October 8th, 2008
$236m judgment against spammer couple
How much is spam worth? In the case of a couple who sent millions of spams to a small ISP, $236 million. That’s the judgment a federal judge in Iowa levied against the husband-and-wife spamming team of Henry Perez and Suzanne Bartok, IDG reports.
Over four months in 2003, the couple used a program appropriately called Bulk Mailing 4 Dummies (a name that not only nicely describes its user base but simultaneously violates IDG Books’ trademark on the “For Dummies” books) to send millions of emails to little CIS Internet Services of Clinton, Iowa. CIS underwent an expensive server upgrade and devoted three servers to blocking the scumbags’ spam assault.
CIS owner Robert Kramer III said the company was processing about 500 million spam messages every day in 2003.
“There were millions of e-mails being delivered to us for each spam campaign to users that didn’t exist on our servers,” Kramer said in an interview. “It was do or die: it wasn’t just a nuisance for us.”
Perez and Bartok claimed the emails they sent were legit. That argument was just a lie, the court said.
“The court simply does not believe Mr. Perez or Ms. Bartok,” Judge John Jarvey wrote in a Sept. 30 order.
CIS has sued and won judgments against 10 spammer so far, but good luck collecting on those, or from Perez and Bartok. Many spammers simply fold their companies or move the money overseas.
No word on this couple’s assets but one suspects it is less than $236 million. The size of the judgment – based on $10 per spam – may be more of a deterrent than one that compensates CIS for its losses.
