Suing Spammers

Posted on | December 8, 2008 | 1 Comment

Several years ago, congress, in their infinite wisdom, passed a law which enabled the producers of SPAM, or UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail) to be held liable for sending crap to our e-mail boxes. Out of legislation, several websites sprung up that teach you how to do this. If you type “how to sue a spammer” into Googles search box, you will most likely see a link to http://www.angryox.com/vaspam/. The author lists several “steps” to take to sue the people who send you SPAM. There are several other sites as well such as www.suespammers.net

Don’t believe a word of this

Apparently, the law is really written for Internet Service Providers. In a story by PC World, one of these people making a living suing Spammers has to pony up $111,000 in legal fees for the defendants. The story, in part says:

..the court ruled against [the plaintiff], saying that he and other recipients of spam have no standing under the federal CAN-SPAM Act because they have not been “adversely affected” within the meaning of the law. The court said the recipient of the spam must be adversely affected in the same way that an Internet service provider would be, meaning he would have problems such as network and bandwidth slowdowns, greater demands on personnel or require new equipment.

So before you start getting lawsuit happy, you had better make sure that you can prove real damage done. Judges are becoming more critical of this practice and they don’t like their time wasted by people just making a living off the legal system.

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