Verizon has reached a settlement in a spam lawsuit against Additional Benefits, LLC, a Detroit commercial e-mail company and its owner, Alan Ralsky.
Reston, VA-based Verizon Online, a unit of Verizon, sued Additional Benefits in March 2001, alleging that the defendants flooded its subscribers with millions of unsolicited commercial e-mail in late 2000.
The specific terms of the Oct. 25 settlement are secret, but it includes a permanent injunction halting Ralsky’s business.
Ralsky could not be reached for comment.
“The permanent injunction pleases us very much because it’s going to assure our customers that they will ever have to receive an unsolicited e-mail from this individual again,” said Bobbi Henson, spokesperson for Verizon.
The settlement also includes an undisclosed financial settlement. In the complaint, which was filed in federal court in Alexandria, VA, Verizon sought damages of $10 for each e-mail message transmitted or $25,000 for each day a message was sent.
In three incidents in November and December 2000, Ralsky allegedly disrupted Verizon’s e-mail by sending out tens of millions of e-mail messages advertising diet pills, online gambling and credit repair tools and more.
According to the complaint, the messages violated federal and Virginia state laws that bar unsolicited bulk e-mail from being sent to Internet service providers like Verizon.
The e-mail delayed e-mail for some 200,000 Verizon Internet users, from Maine to Virginia, by clogging Verizon’s servers.
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