NY AG Sues MonsterHut Over Marketing Spam

Ian Hill writes: "This BBC article tells how NY State Attorney Elliot Spitzer has sued marketing firm MonsterHut.com over "millions" of unsolicited e-mails. He claims MonsterHut.com falsely told its clients that e-mails sent on their behalf were sent to addresses who registered themselves as interested parties. Also at question is how exactly these addresses were collected." eviljim adds a link to a press release from New York's Attorney General and a reminder of how MonsterHut was disconnected from their ISP.

Comments

Good - Make SPAM cost the spammer

[stoolpigeon]

It is about time some of the cost associated w/spam got moved to the spammer. More of this can only be a good thing. If it gets too expensive, maybe it will slow down.

I do worry though about legal remedies just moving the problem to where the laws don't exist.

.

Re:Good - Make SPAM cost the spammer

[adamjaskie]

If Comcast starts charging me by amount downloaded per month, or even just limits me to a cetain amount, I will attempt to sue spammers based on the amount of bandwidth I end up using to download their crap. That will cost per email. Class action anyone?

Re:Good - Make SPAM cost the spammer

[darkonc]

The infomercials about growing your penis are paid for by the advertisers. It also doesn't cost you anything to receive them. -- and you can program your TIvo to skip over them late at night (when most of them are on).

I have no problem with the infomercials, because they don't pretend to be anything else, and they don't fill up my mailbox, and they don't cost me more than the cost the person who paid to put them on the TV station.

Besides, if you actually sit up at 5AM watching one of those things, then you obviously don't have anything better to do, so they're providing you a service .. (at the very least, they're helping to pay the TV station for the costs of broadcasting 'buffy'.)

Micropayments

[ldspartan]

It'd be really cool to see mandatory micropayments for UBE - I would be willing to accept the extra load on my mailservers if I know I was making a tenth of a penny per message.

Hell, running an open relay would rapidly go from moronic to profitable :).

--
Phil

Criminal Perjury Charges

[Erasmus Darwin]

Personally, I'd like to see perjury charges brought against the individuals who lied under oath ("All our addresses are opt-in. Honest!") in order to obtain the infamous injunction that prevented Paetec from TOSing Monsterhut.

On a sidenote (with regard to the quest for the email address source), it's fairly common knowledge (enough so that Paetec mentioned it somewhere on litigation.paetec.net back when they were soliciting affidavits from spammed parties) that a number of the addresses used came from WHOIS records.

Cell phone spamming

[FatAlb3rt]

...came to my attention last week when my wife signed up for text messaging for her cell phone. Her plan allows the first 100 messages each month free, with extras for an additional price after that. What happens if (when) that number gets on spam lists it can be sent in the form of an email, ie, cell-number@provider.com? At the rate I get spam in my inbox, surely she'll run over the 100 limit, and it WILL cost me money to receive spam. Surely there's cause for recourse at that point?

Wouldn't be too hard to take the ball and run with this one. Get on the message boards and put your number in your sig. Too bad I don't have the time or resources to do it.

Re:Cell phone spamming

[BagOBones]

That happened to me already.. My account came with e-mail at 10 cents Canadian a message.. but all the e-mail addresses on the network where the same format areacode-phonenumber@companyname so a marketing CO just started randomly e-mailing addresses because they could easily guess valid adressess.. I had to quickly remove the e-mail option from the phone because the charges stated to add up fast... When I asked the phone company if they could block or filter such messages.. they said there was nothing they could do.. I no longer have e-mail on my phone because of stupid SPAMERS!

Thank god for Elliot

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a New York State resident and I must say that Elliot Spitzer has been nothing short of wonderful when it comes to protecting the consumer.

First it was unsoliticited phone calls (we were one of the first states to set up a no-call list). Now I recieve maybe 1 unsoliticited call every 2-3 months instead of 1 or 2 a day (and at dinner time.... arrrrgggg).

Then it was dissent on the microsoft case. In all likelyhood, New York State served as a keystone for the 9 dissident states.

Now we've got Spitzer battling the evil spam demons. My guess is that once again, Spitzer will come out on top.

Spitzer is a definately a defendant of consumer rights and privacy and has been unwavering in his cause.

my .02

Re:There is one!

[bitchx]

I'll call your ruling:

Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.

Not that I think that spam is good, rather the argument that "My mail server is mine, thus spam is illegal" does not follow.

- Justice Black, U.S. Supreme Court, Marsh v. State of Ala., 326 U.S. 501 (1946)