It’s not that he’s likely to collect it to the last dollar, but Clinton, Iowa Internet service and email provider Robert Kramer has won what just might be the largest damage award ever levied against spammers. And all he had to do to bag them was take them up on one of their offers: buying the spy software their spam was hawking.
A federal judge awarded Kramer the default judgment against three email markets under both Iowa state anti-spam laws and federal racketeering laws December 18. The breakdown is $360 million against Florida-based Cash Link Systems, $720 million against Arizona-based AMP Dollar Savings, and $140,000 against another Florida company, TEI Marketing Group.
Court documents indicated no representatives of any of the three companies showed up in court during a November trial.
U.S. District Judge Charles Wolle ruled that Kramer’s CIS Internet Services was harmed by unsolicited commercial e-mails flushed through his inbound e-mail servers by the three companies from mid-2000 through October 2003, when Kramer finally sued over a spam invasion he noticed had hit as high as ten million e-mails a day at its worst.
CIS Internet Services reportedly had five thousand subscribers, with Kramer forced to spend time daily repairing e-mail servers choked down by the spam deluge. Wolle filed the defaults against Cash Link, AMP Dollar Savings, and TEI under both Iowa’s Ongoing Criminal Conduct Act and the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Kramer's spam trouble was traced also to a CD-ROM known to be sold to spammers, Bulk Mailing 4 Dummies. This package is said to include guidelines for spamming and a large resource of dummy e-mail addresses for some of the Internet’s largest providers, including America Online, Microsoft Network, Hotmail, and Earthlink, according to the Wolle ruling.
While most of the addresses were for large providers such as America Online, Microsoft Network, Hotmail and Earthlink, CIS somehow had 2.8 million addresses entered on the CD-ROM, Wallace said.
Kramer’s attorney, Kelly O. Wallace, introduced a reported 1,400 pieces of evidence including several of the spam messages crowding CIS servers and log files of computer usage. Wallace also said Kramer expects realistically to recover nothing but perhaps his costs in filing the litigation.
