Widely criticized e-mail marketer OptInRealBig.com has settled with New York State over charges that the company send unsolicited and deceptive spam on behalf of its clients to New York e-mail users.
Attorney General Eliot Spitzer told reporters OptInRealBig.com and its chief Scott Richter paid $40,000 in penalties and $10,000 in investigative costs under the settlement deal signed in state Supreme Court July 19.
OptInRealBig.com also agreed to give Spitzer's office customer information and every advertisement it sends, not to mention promising to use proper identification information when registering domain names, according to a published report.
"This settlement holds Richter and his company to a new standard of accountability in their delivery of e-mails," Spitzer said to reporters. "If he does not fulfill these standards, he will find himself back in court, facing greater penalties." Spitzer's office originally said they would seek penalties as high as $20 million in the case.
Richter's attorney and father, Steven Richter, said they were torqued by a July 19 news release in which Spitzer called Scott Richter a deceptive spammer, while Spitzer's office said neither Richter nor his company admitted any wrongdoing in the settlement. OptInRealBig had been accused in the original New York lawsuit of using fake "from" and "subject" lines, usually the kind showing the messages part of continuing conversations and not commercial lures the recipients didn't want.
Earlier this month, OptInRealBig.com suffered a setback when a federal judge turned down OptIn's bid to block SpamCop from keeping tabs on the company, which SpamCop accuses of being a major spam source.
OptIn is suing SpamCop, accusing the spam-fighting block-list operator of interfering with and damaging its business by naming it publicly as a spam source, which caused Internet service providers in turn to block OptIn-generated e-mail.
U.S. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong ruled that SpamCop could not be held accountable for posting spam reports about OptIn, reports protected under the Communications Decency Act, the judge held. That law says ISPs can't be held liable for publishing content generated by outside sources.
OptInRealBig.com is also still involved in litigation with Microsoft in Washington State, with the software giant accusing OptInRealBig.com of hijacking computers to use as spam zombies flushing millions of unsolicited commercial e-mails around the Web. But the two sides in that case have been reported to be working on a settlement of their own.
