Earthlink takes Nevada spammer for $11m

Which is nice

By Drew Cullen • Get more from this author

Posted in Spam, 13th September 2006 23:14 GMT

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A Nevada bulk email firm has been ordered to pay Earthlink $11m for spamming the ISP's customers. Earthlink won the judgment in a CAN-SPAM suit filed in a federal court in Atlanta against KSTM LLC. According to Earthlink, this business illegally sent millions of mortgage-touting emails and is now prohibited from:

falsifying the "from" field in the e-mail address (spoofing)

hiding the identity of the email sender (cloaking)

selling e-mail addresses

accessing or obtaining EarthLink accounts

Time for a CANned quote from Larry Slovensky, Assistant General Counsel for EarthLink: "This judgment should be fair warning that if you spam, we will sue." Go get 'em, guys!

Earthlink is perhaps the most active litigator against spammers, boasting that since 1996 it has won more than $200m in judgments and succeeded in getting two spammers sent to jail. Still, it has yet to dig up the back yard of the parents of a spammer, a first claimed last month by AOL, which was searching for buried gold.

It is nice to see an ISP going that extra mile for spam victims, but AOL's difficulty in claiming the $12.8m owed by penis-pill king Davis Hawke - he is the owner of the supposed buried gold - shows that obtaining judgments and obtaining the money due from judgments are very different matters indeed.

We suspect that Earthlink has collected much, much less than the headline $200m - bulk spammers are not exactly the personality types to squirrel away their ill-gotten gains into get-at-able cash and securities. ®

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