The spam wars have escalated with a high-profile lawsuit filed last week by Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly against a ring of spammers that authorities call among the world’s largest οΎ— having allegedly sent computer users millions of unsolicited messages.
The move against the so-called “Internet Spam Gang,” accused of luring consumers to buy everything from pirated software to pornography, was hailed as another victory for consumer rights.
With some estimates showing that half of all e-mail sent each day is spam, law enforcement has increasingly stepped in. The Federal Trade Commission has lodged several recent complaints, and states such as Florida, California, and Massachusetts are leading the way in their own jurisdictions. Last summer, Reilly became the first state attorney general to file a lawsuit under the federal CAN-SPAM Act, which went into effect Jan. 1, 2004.
‘Tilting at Windmills’
Still, victory in this technology age is elusive. While domestic spammers have been deterred by CAN-SPAM and aggressive moves by the states in recent years, the law does not reach across borders. Much of the spam that Americans receive in their inboxes comes from the Bahamas, Europe, or the Ukraine.
Those violators who do reside in the United States tend to be underfunded and underground. The result, as one expert puts it, is a version of the “Whack a Mole” game: Hammer one spammer down, another pops up.
“It’s a little bit like tilting at windmills, but you’ve got to do it; you’ve got to try,” says David Strickler, CEO of MailWise, a Boston company that culls spam from the mail flow. Strickler says that states need to keep following the lead of attorneys general like Reilly, who has made spam cases punishable and highly public. “But it will take this lawsuit, and a hundred thousand other lawsuits, to make a tiny dent.”
At the very least, the rate of prosecutions under both federal and state laws is ticking upward, experts say: A recent civil suit in Florida charged a group with registering 350 domains, operating 75 Web sites, and hawking everything from tobacco to pirated movies.
By Sara B. Miller And Patrik Jonsson, The Christian Science Monitor
