Using Microsoft trademarks as spam lures is going to cost Canoga Park, California spammer Daniel Khoshnood $3.95 million, the damage award a federal judge ordered the manager of Pointcom, Inc. to pay Microsoft in a ruling this week.
Microsoft sued Khoshnood in 2003, accusing him of abusing Hotmail and MSN e-mail services by mass spamming messages that misrepresented ties to Microsoft, including messages presenting variations of Microsoft domains as security patches or system updates but were really links to Goto.com – a Website paying affiliates three cents a message to send it traffic.
Court documents indicated Khoshnood handled two e-mail campaigns luring Netizens into downloading a purported toolbar to automatically update Microsoft security patches. The download, the documents said, was available at WindowsUpdate.com, a Khoshnood domain name that violated Microsoft trademark rights.
Microsoft sued under laws in place before CAN-SPAM took effect this year. The Redmond, Washington software giant had also said Khoshnood was a target of several major companies accusing him of trademark typosquatting, including America Online, American Express, BMW, CompUSA, Expedia, Southwestern Bell, and others.
Indeed, Khoshnood is not exactly a new name in the spam watching world. British anti-spam watchdogs Spamhaus has listed him on their Registry of Known Spam Operations. And other published reports have said he built a 1990s reputation for swallowing domain names based on well known people or companies and using them to send Netizens to porn or other Web-related products.
