WWW- Spam is a very serious problem nowadays, and that's the reason why more and more companies are filing lawsuits against spammers who disrupt their services, and they usually win. But the latest sentence in such a case is quite unbelievable, and sets a very dangerous precedent (dangerous for the spammers, that is): a fee of $11.2bn. Thus, a small Iowa-based ISP has been awarded this huge sum in a record judgment against a Florida spammer. CIS Internet Services successfully sued James McCalla over claims he sent more than 280m illegal spam messages with fraudulent return addresses towards CIS accounts, punting mortgages, debt consolidation services, pornographic and gambling websites. The judgment by US District Judge Charles Wolle, issued in late December 2005, further bans McCalla from using the internet for three years. The judgment against McCalla of Florida is the culmination of a multi-defendant lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa in 2003 by Robert W. Kramer III, owner of CIS Internet Services in Clinton. A representative of the business said Kramer would not comment beyond a news release sent Tuesday. "I'm pleased with Judge Wolle's ruling," Kramer said in the release, according to the Quad City Times. "It's a victory for every e-mail user and every responsible ISP. It's proof our courts and Congress are committed to protecting the public. "E-mail is an innovation like atomic energy or the automobile. In the beginning, the opportunity for misuse is obvious. For e-mail, that's now changed," he said. "This ruling sets a new standard. Gross abusers of e-mail risk exposure to public ridicule as well as the economic death penalty." The lawsuit claimed that McCalla sent more than 280 million illegal spam e-mail messages into CIS's network. CIS Internet Services, which was started in 1996, provides Internet connections to areas around Bellevue, Clinton, Fort Madison, Low Moor, Maquoketa and West Point in Iowa and Albany, Fulton and Savanna in Illinois.
Kramer's lawsuit initially named numerous defendants, many of whom were weeded out and dropped from the lawsuit over the past couple of years. Other defendants named in the lawsuit, however, including Cash Link Systems of Florida, AMP Dollar Savings Inc. of Arizona, and TEI Marketing Group Inc. of Florida were ordered in 2004 to pay judgments totaling more than $1 billion to CIS Internet Services. The lawsuit said the defendants "falsely and illegally represented that their e-mails originated from CIS or from some other user of the 'cis.net' domain." The e-mails, the lawsuit states, used the "cis.net" domain as part of a falsified return address. By doing so, the defendants disguised the true source of the e-mails "to deflect the thousands of inevitable complaints from disgruntled recipients of the e-mails." Kramer's company is one of many that have filed lawsuits against spammers over the past several years. AOL and Microsoft each have filed numerous lawsuits against spammers. According to the Web site for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, or CAUCE, large numbers of junk e-mails have knocked out or disrupted Internet provider systems belonging to large Internet providers such as AT&T, as well as systems belonging to smaller rural providers such as CIS. Additionally, the massive numbers of spam e-mails cost businesses and individuals millions of dollars each year. John Mozena, co-founder and vice president of CAUCE, said Tuesday that the judgment against McCalla is the largest one he has heard. "By a couple orders of magnitude," he said. "And we're happy Mr. Kramer is holding spammers accountable."
