An American company has sued an as yet unidentified group of spammers for a cool billion US dollars in the hope that the legal action may lead them to find out who the actual spammers are. The move was initiated by the anti-spam organization Unspam Technologies and its spam monitoring project, Project Honey Pot.
Project Honey Pot has tens of thousands of members in some one hundred countries. These numbers highlight the fact that spam has become a truly global problem in recent years.
According to the complaint lodged at a Virginia court last April, spam now constitutes up to 90% of all email traffic. The organization that lodged the unprecedented case in Virginia believes spammers, even though they may be harvesting users' email addresses from open online sources, are contravening US anti-spam legislation and have hidden their identity to "avoid detection".
Interestingly, the complaint is directed against "John Doe" spam merchants rather than any particular spamming group. Unspam hopes that this court action could help them pinpoint actual perpetrators, who will be brought to light through the legal process. The group has collected a lot of data since the launch of Project Honey Pot in 2004; it hopes the data can now be used to track those responsible for the flood of spam in users' mailboxes. The court will also be asked to permit the examination of ISP records. This would provide crucial links to spammers, making it possible to find concrete suspects in what has already been termed a landmark case for the anti-spam world.
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