Imagine responding to what you believe is a legitimate request for e-mail submitted through your Web site and ending up in the crosshairs of a lawsuit-happy anti-spam crusader.
Then imagine the anti-spammer tries to shake your company down for $6,250. When you refuse to pay, he launches a vicious online smear campaign against you and your company, saying it was built on criminal activities, among other things. After you fight back in court, he sues you—all for 11 e-mails from which he could have easily opted out of at any time.
A recent admission by Oklahoma-based anti-spammer Mark Mumma makes this look to be the case in his crusade against Virginia-based travel marketer Omega World Travel.
In an interview with Magilla Marketing recently, Mumma resorted to name-calling and became increasingly upset to the point where he sarcastically accused this reporter of having a gay affair with Omega’s lawyer.
Most importantly, however, Mumma admitted someone probably registered his e-mail address on Omega’s Web site.
“Well, somebody did opt my address in,” said Mumma. “I don’t know who the hell it was. I have a pretty good idea. I don’t have any concrete proof.”
This is a crucial admission. It means even Mumma understands that Omega was responding to what its executives believed was a legitimate request for information and that Omega apparently was neither harvesting addresses nor renting spam lists.
“For the longest time Mumma claimed that the request was never made,” Omega’s staff lawyer, John Lawless, said in an e-mail. “Now he has acknowledged that his address was placed in our box, but not by him.”
Omega’s battle with Mumma began two years ago.
After Mumma received some e-mail from Omega he claimed he didn’t solicit, he called Lawless to complain, according to court records. When Lawless asked for Mumma’s e-mail address so he could get it removed from Omega’s files, Mumma refused. Instead he gave Lawless a list of some 300 domains, according to Lawless.
Lawless claims he told Mumma he’d see what he could do.
“What I agreed to do was take down the list of domain names to our tech department and see what they could do with them,” said Lawless. “As you might imagine, our tech department did not have the time or resources to sort through approximately 300 domains and remove any e-mail associated with those names from our list. And we certainly had no legal obligation to take that step.”
And here is where it gets ugly.
When Omega refused, postings on one of Mumma’s anti-spam Web sites accused Omega, its Web site Cruise.com and its owners Daniel and Gloria Bohan of being spammers. The Web site also posted a photo of the Bohans that had apparently been copied from Cruise.com and described the couple as “Cruise.com spammers,” according to court records.
The Bohans decided to fight back and sued Mumma in federal court for $3.8 million in damages for defamation.
In response, Mumma countersued the Bohans under Oklahoma and federal anti-spam laws.
Last November, The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld a district court ruling in favor of Omega. Though Mumma claimed Omega’s e-mail headers contained law-breaking inaccuracies, the court said the inaccuracies did not make Omega’s headers “materially false or materially misleading.”
What’s more, court records say that Omega’s e-mails were “chock full of methods to ‘identify, locate, or respond to’ the sender.”
Each of the e-mails Mumma allegedly received from Cruise.com reportedly contained an opt-out link, a physical postal address, a link to the Cruise.com Web site and a toll-free number to reach the company.
Omega clearly wasn’t trying to hide its identity.
Mumma could have opted out at any time. According to Lawless, Mumma’s operation looks more like a shakedown than an altruistic crusade.
“This guy doesn’t care about spam, he cares about trying to generate revenue,” said Lawless. “At least, looking at his site, that’s the way it appears.”
Omega has been labeled a spammer in the national media, most notably in an article in Time magazine with the headline “A Spammer’s Revenge.” However, Time has since posted a response from Lawless and an editor’s note with the article saying it regrets labeling Omega a spammer.
Meanwhile, Omega is going ahead with its defamation suit, which Lawless expects to go to trial in late spring or early summer.
The company wants the court to order Mumma to pay damages and “cease and desist from making damaging statements about us,” said Lawless. “The reason we filed suit was to protect our name and our integrity, and that’s still the reason we continue to pursue this, because clearly, we have no idea whether he’s going to be able to pay damages or attorneys fees or costs.”
Mumma claims on his Web site, Slappsuit.com, he has spent $70,000 of his own money to pay legal fees and is broke.
Lawless claims Omega is not trying to shut Mumma up.
“He can talk all he wants, what we’re trying to do is protect our good name,” said Lawless. “We’re trying to acquire a determination from the court that his activities have been defamatory in that he’s not only called us spammers, but criminal spammers and has declared that we built our company on illegal spam.”
Lawless said Mumma has posted other defamatory messages on his Web site, such as saying Lawless was either on drugs or had forgotten to take his medication.
“When you start attacking our company, saying we built our company on spam, calling our owners and principals criminals, and calling me a pothead and a mentally deranged person on drugs, that’s over the line,” said Lawless. “When you attack a company to the point where it may affect the company’s reputation, that’s defamatory.”
Mumma called Magilla Marketing recently to respond to questions submitted through his Web site.
Below is a link to a transcript of the interview. The exchange says a lot about the self-proclaimed tireless litigator’s mentality.
Click here for transcript.
