Man Sneaks Spam Lawsuit In While He Still Could
from the good-for-him dept
I'm curious to see if anyone has noticed a decrease in the amount of spam they receive since January 1, when the new federal spam law went into effect. Personally, my spam levels are identical to what they were in the month of December, suggesting spammers couldn't care any less about the federal law. Of course, one of the (many) bad things about the law is the fact that it wipes out a variety of (stricter) state level anti-spam laws. I'm assuming this includes the anti-spam law in the state of Washington that let individuals sue spammers for $500/message. Luckily, Jim Gordon, appears to have filed his latest spam lawsuits late last year, early enough that the Washington state laws still mattered. He's suing a Pennsylvania spammer, Commonwealth Marketing Group, $500 for each of 1,200 spam messages he believes he's received from the spammer. He sent them a letter asking them to stop and they ignored it. The spammer's responses are typical. First they claim the guy requested emails from the spammer - and then add a cryptic statement: "our computers are programmed to identify him." Next, they turns the case around and suggest that it's really a "scam" being pulled by Gordon to extort money out of them. The firm's CEO also claims that their emails are completely legitimate and not misleading at all. He says this with a straight face despite the fact that the company's owner is currently serving a 15-month prison sentence for fraud. Apparently, the company pitches credit cards via spam to low income people, forcing them to buy a vacation package on the card. After they've charged the vacation package the car has $13 of remaining credit, causing the cards to be rejected anywhere they're used.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Spam! CMG!
I actually fell for the USA card and the scam is, you pay $149 to get the card, and a voucher for your $149 which you can spend in their shop to help improve your credit.
What they don't tell you: All purchases you make, you must pay 50% immediately, and then you can use the voucher for the other 50% of the cost. That's not nice!
To make it worse, the products they sell at extreme prices you can find for 20% or less.
Mostly pocket knives and cheap cookware. It's just sad. After several tries I finally got a real person to talk to and showed them that I coud get their products for almost nothing compared to their prices and they explained. It's not a credit card, it's a tool to make bad credit get better, and they supposedly report each successful purchsae you make to the three credit reporting companies. Should have checked them out first!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Funny that you say that...
Looks like what we need is not anti-spam laws but more Christmas ;-) Seems spammers take Christmas holidays as well and are now returning to work.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Funny that you say that...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No decrease
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
spam filter
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Xanax
Hell,
I cut my stress levels by 90% by TAKING my Xanax before opening my inbox ...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]