Jo’s Cafe

“The fight against big-time spammers is a tough one, but sometimes the little guy can win. ”

That’s how the article starts out at Yahoo!News. Spammers, to me are the dregs of society, the lowest form of natural pond scum out there in the on-line world. The only thing lower are the murderers, rapists, and those that feed on the elderly and children. Hell, I’d take a car-salesman or lawyer over a spammer any day.

The article goes on to say:

Beginning in 2000, the Internet service provider (ISP) based in Clinton, Iowa, (population: 35,000) [CIS Internet] began to be deluged with tens of millions of spam e-mails. A CD-ROM popular among spammers had some 2.8 million e-mail addresses for real and bogus CIS clients. It included names likes john@cis.net and [left out for taste purposes]. [...] Its single T1 Internet connection couldn’t handle the e-mail onslaught, which caused servers that should have run untroubled for months to crash frequently.

CIS Internet hired one of the top notch attorneys in the country that handles spammers, Paul “Pete” Wellborn III and Kelly Wallace.

With Wallace taking the lead, the attorneys identified 300 “John Doe” spammers and filed suit in U.S. District court in Iowa in October, 2003.

Victory, at least moral, came last December. Setting a financial precedent, a federal judge awarded $1.08 billion in damages to CIS, blaming three companies identified as using its servers to send unsolicited e-mail. None of the companies — Florida-based Cash Link Systems and TEI Marketing, and Arizona-based AMP Dollar Savings — ever responded to the court. It didn’t matter. The judgment was the largest ever against spammers.

One small step at a time — Bravo!