More Spammers Get The Smackdown

Here's another tasty bit of internet justice. Hot off the presses from ComputerWorld.com, a couple just got hammered with a... (dramatic pause) ...$256 MILLION fine for inundating people with junk email.

"Henry Perez and his wife Suzanne Bartok were ordered to pay the damages -- amounting to US$10 per bulk e-mail -- following a four-year court case in which the judge found that they had bombarded CIS Internet Services of Clinton, Iowa, over a four-month period in 2003."

It's probably a safe bet that CIS will never see any of that money but it feels good to hear about spammers getting what they deserve. Evidently, CIS was getting hit so hard, the massive amount of emails they received ate away at their bandwidth. So much so, that they ended up loosing about 3800 customers in 3 years even after buying dedicated servers to keep the spam at bay.

ComputerWorld reports that "...CIS has filed suit against many spammers and so far it has received about 10 judgments in its favor, Kramer said. Collecting the money has proven to be difficult, however. Many of the spammers have gone out of business, moved their money overseas or simply hidden from sight..." At least they can't do business as normal or as easy as they once did.

I always wondered how Hormel feels about "Spam" being used in such a derrogatory manner. I would think it kind of puts a damper on the marketing of such a fine product.