Suing spammers for fun and profit

> You're promoting a product that you don't even use??

Doesn't mean I don't know a bit about it, and have many colleagues also recommending it. I just don't need to support my wife's use of it too much since she used to work in motherboard and CPU tech support for Intel, although I have installed and configured SpamPal for a half-dozen co-workers.

> I hope you have a lot of time, money and a good lawyer if you're going to
> start suing the spammers.

Hehe. There's a mailing list for spam litigators, and if you do it right, you can make more from settlements than from actually filing and making them show up to defend themselves. Check out http://www.pyramidspam.com/ for a few lawsuit PDFs by my friend Robert Braver of junkfaxes.org fame.

> If I decided to do that, I would have to quit my
> job and devote my entire life to it.

Naw, it can start out as a hobby, using small claims.

> By my estimation, I would be filing
> around 300 lawsuits per day (give or take). That is probably a
> conservative estimate based on how many I get, and how many would actually
> trace back to a real person.

Factor in how many of those real persons can be brought to California to defend themselves, and you might get a managable number. I plan to start with mortgage brokers who buy leads from the spammers. If you make up a distinctive identity (one per spam - and log them all in a data base), you can fill out the spammer's form, and then wait a day or two until you start to get calls from brokers to that identity. Since the beneficiary of the spam can be argued to be equally liable as the spammer, you file against the broker. They will always claim they "just buy leads" and then you tell them they might have a counter-claim against the spammer, but you have a complete chain of evidence against THEM.

Since they're in a highly regulated industry, and somewhat dependent on good-will, adverse publicity might motivate some of them to settle after they get a well-written demand letter.

Microsoft and Robert Braver have sued a few dozen MLM spammers using data I posted at http://www.theclubbuiltonspam.com/1upautomated.html, and there's no reason to think that a web site about unethical mortgage brokers won't be effective.

> Maybe Arnold can donate a few of his millions to the cause! :-)

Har! His Attorney General's office could be doing a lot more, and now they're empowered by the new law, I expect they will be. Some time ago, they asked some of us anti-spammers for a list of the top ten perps we wished they would go after, and we gave it to them.

http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/1474451 was the first lawsuit, and was won a year later, in Oct 2003: http://ag.ca.gov/newsalerts/2003/03-130.htm

Paul Willis is certainly out of the spam business now. Only another 199 professionals to go:

http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso

Bill