An anti-spam organization has filed what it claims is the first federal lawsuit aimed at e-mail address harvesters. It seeks damages of up to $1 billion.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, VA by a Utah-based Unspam Technologies Inc.
Unspam’s chief executive, Matthew Prince, is also co-founder of Project Honey Pot, an organization dedicated to tracking spam harvesters worldwide.
Prince is infamous in e-mail marketing circles for having lobbied in numerous states to establish so-called child-protection do-not-e-mail registries and then winning the contracts to maintain the registries in the two states that implemented them: Utah and Michigan.
According to a published statement, Unspam’s suit names a series of “John Doe” defendants using any of the 2.6 million IP addresses that Project Honey Pot has determined harvested one or more of its spam trap addresses. Harvesting e-mail addresses — or scraping them off Internet sites — is illegal under the Can-Spam Act.
Prince reportedly hopes to find out who is behind some of these IP addresses during the discovery process.
“Our members have one thing in common: they all want spam to stop,” said Prince in a statement. “Aided by the vast amount of data our community of volunteers has helped gather, as well as the top legal minds in the anti-spam world, we are bringing this fight to the spammers. This suit will make them slither out from under the rocks where they’re hiding.”
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