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December 18, 2004
Iowa ISP Awarded Billion-dollar Spam Judgment
A federal court has reportedly awarded default judgments totalling $1.22 billion to CIS Internet, an Internet service provider based in Clinton, Iowa. The judgments are believed to be the largest ever in a spam case.
Attorneys for CIS originally filed the lawsuit in October 2003 against 300 "John Doe" spammers. The ISP, which had 5,000 customers, was receiving up to 10 million spams per day.
The court awarded judgments against three spam companies after they failed to respond to the lawsuit: $360 million against Cash Link Systems Inc. of Florida; $720 million against AMP Dollar Savings Inc. of Florida; and $140,000 against TEI Marketing Group Inc. of Florida.
CIS's lawsuits against other companies continue. "Our goal is the economic death penalty," said the ISP's attorney, Kelly O. Wallace of The Wellborn Firm in Atlanta. Wallace admitted that the owner of CIS was unlikely to collect the entire amount of the judgment but hoped "at least to recover his costs."
Posted by brian at December 18, 2004 5:49 AM
Comments
That's my Internet service! CIS actually has created (out of necessity) an e-mail infrastructure capable of handling millions of users, and spam filters have become very effective for us. I was happy to hear about it.
Posted by: Aaron Harpole at December 19, 2004 8:39 PM
