EarthLink Sues Spammers

EarthLink Inc. filed a federal lawsuit against 100 people for sending unsolicited Email. Most of the accused are located in Alabama and Canada.

The third largest ISP is suing for $5 million for lost productivity time and bandwidth costs. EarthLink says more than 250 million spam Emails were sent out in a period of six months before being detected.

The suit is actually two-fold. One part of the suit targets alleged spammers in a Birmingham, AL, ring.

You've probably seen the ads that went out for herbal Viagra, online dating services and pornography. Users set up more than 100 phony accounts with false customer names and information to send out the messages.

The other part of the suit is mainly targeting a ring in Vancouver, British Columbia. This ring of users is accused of tricking unsuspecting Internet users into sending sensitive information such as your passwords and credit card numbers. Web sites that looked like Amazon.com and PayPal.com were decoys that really stole information when the user entered it.

EarthLink claims AOL was also a target. The suspected spammers allegedly sent Emails posing as AOL staff and asking for member names, passwords and credit card information.

While the bulk of the unsolicited Emails is a real problem for EarthLink, a company spokesperson says the identify theft makes the case much more severe.

In May 2003, EarthLink won a $16 million settlement against a New York man accused of spamming. Earthlink says the man sent over 825 million unsolicited Email messages through its network.