[ale] OT: pursuing spammers through the legal system

[Keith R. Watson]

At 03:20 PM 4/9/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>I'm beginning to see quite a few bouncebacks from a spam campaign that
>surrepitiously generated, for the mail envelope and other origination
>address headers, random addresses based on my domain (e.g.,
>" f0ls53lfkj at fulton green dot com ").
>
>Obviously, this is an especially henious act, and I'd like to see justice
>served for this crime, whether through the criminal or civil avenues of
>the law.
>
>So here are a few questions:
>
>1) Who could I consider the perps in this case?  The ones actually
>    spamming me, or the ones paying that spammer (whether it's the
>    advertiser or a "middleman" "spam-broker"), or both?  The advertiser
>    is pretty easy to track down; the spammer will be more difficult
>    unless the advertiser cooperates in the investigation.
>2) Is there a good "e-attorney" in town that knows enough about situations
>    like this that could take on my case?
>3) If the spam originated from a person living out-of-state (or even out-
>    of-country), how does that effect the viability of my case against the
>    perps?
>
>Major TIAs for this one.


Fulton,

I read about this type of thing recently. Here are a few references.

This site chronicles how a guy went about suing a spammer
http://purplecow.com/vaspam/

This is an article about suing spammers and how it is becoming more common
http://www.techtv.com/news/politicsandlaw/story/0,24195,3372812,00.html


I did a search on Google with

    how to sue spammers


and came up with some rather interesting links. I really didn't expect to 
get the results I did, but I figured it couldn't hurt to try. It seems that 
there is legislation taking shape across the country to make it possible to 
sue spammers just for sending spam. If there are no laws in your state 
against spamming, then you don't seem to have many options. In your case 
however, you may be able to sue because they are using your name to do it; 
which may already be covered under existing statutes. I would think some 
basic research is in order and then a call to a lawyer.

Please let the list know what you find out.

happy spammer hunting,
keith

-------------

Keith R. Watson                        GTRI/ITD
Systems Support Specialist III         Georgia Tech Research Institute
keith.watson at gtri.gatech.edu           Atlanta, GA  30332-0816
404-894-0836

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