Canadians Charged under spam law

[Jimmer]

Yahoo! spam suit snares city trio

KITCHENER (Mar 11, 2004)

Three members of a Kitchener family are being sued by Yahoo! Inc. as part of a campaign launched by Internet companies against spam e-mails.

Eric Daniel Head, Matthew Head and Barry Head are listed in one of six lawsuits announced yesterday by Internet companies in the United States.

None of the Heads could be reached for comment.

The legal actions filed by Microsoft Corp., America Online Inc., Earthlink Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. represent the first major industry actions under new anti-spam legislation that went into effect Jan. 1.

The companies have joined forces to go after hundreds of people accused of sending millions of unwanted e-mails in violation of the new U.S. law.

Yahoo! Inc. has launched the specific lawsuit against the members of the Head family in Kitchener.

94 MILLION E-MAILS

Yahoo! accuses the three Heads of sending 94 million e-mails to its subscribers since Jan. 1 and soliciting people to visit websites registered to false Chinese names and addresses.

Yahoo! claims the Heads were running Golddisk.net and at least four other Internet companies, all of which identified Eric Head as an officer and director.

Eric and Matthew Head are brothers and former students of Forest Heights Collegiate who, two years ago, raised some eyebrows with another website, www.me6.ca.

That site featured videos of young people acting out crazy stunts, something that raised concerns at the time.

But neither the www.me6.ca site nor the Golddisk.net site now appear to be operating.

The U.S. legislation requires unsolicited e-mails to include a mechanism so recipients can indicate they do not want future mass mailings.

The law also prohibits senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail from disguising their identities by using false return addresses or misleading subject lines.

It also prohibits senders from harvesting addresses from websites.

The anti-spam suits were filed in federal courts in California, Georgia, Virginia and Washington state.

Dozens of those included were identified only as "John Doe'' defendants accused of e-mailing unwanted pitches for prescription drugs, herbal potions or weight-loss plans.

The suit aimed at residents of Canada underscored the view of the anti-spam allies that American law can pursue spammers beyond U.S. borders. "Just because they put a computer off-shore does not put them beyond the reach of the power of the U.S. courts," said Microsoft's Nancy Anderson.

Lawyers expressed confidence they can work through the courts, using subpoenas and other investigative tools, to identify and find those individuals.

The companies filing the lawsuits are using top-gun lawyers to pursue the action.

Yahoo!, for example, employed Marc Zwillinger as one of its lawyers.

Zwillinger is a former computer-crimes expert at the U.S. Justice Department who investigated the high-profile Internet attacks in February 2000 by a Canadian teenager known as Mafia Boy.

"We've been doing this a long time, and we know what we're doing," said Les Seagraves, the assistant general counsel at Earthlink, which named 75 John Doe defendants.

"We're only a couple subpoenas away from standing at someone's door and handing them a summons."

The recording industry has been very successful in identifying Internet users in copyright infringement lawsuits, in most cases tracing a subscriber's unique Internet address.

But spammers are famously skilful at covering their tracks, often routing unwanted e-mails through hacked or unprotected computers overseas and working under aliases and shell companies, complicating efforts to trace and identify them.

"It is a significant challenge,'' acknowledged H. Robert Wientzen, chief executive at the Direct Marketing Association, who said he supports the latest lawsuits.

He said companies are increasingly successful at tracing spammers.

"We're making some progress with techniques and tools that are starting to pay some dividends,'' he said.

The four companies said the defendants include some of America's most notorious large-scale spammers.

The companies said they shared information, resources and investigative information to identify some of them.

Among the named defendants were Davis Wolfgang Hawke of Medfield, Mass., who AOL lawyers said is also known as Dave Bridger; and Braden Bournival of Manchester, N.H.

They, and others, were accused of sending millions of e-mails offering weight-loss supplements, hand-held devices called "personal lie detectors'' or other products.

Hawke did not return a telephone call from the Associated Press to his home.

Bournival moved six months ago from the address in New Hampshire listed in the lawsuit.

[Platinum Red]

jimmer there is nothing there man

[raceman]

copy and paste the story

[Doctor Dre]

You have to register to see the fucking page ... how dumb of a local newspaper.

[Doctor Dre]

But if we start enforcing our own laws that's good . 2 years ago when somebody was spamming everybody would flame him . Nowdays poeople buy and sell email lists on boards. That's just sad.

[Basic_man]

Nice, another spammer owned !

I'm so sick of deleting spam in my mailbox everyday! dang

[WiredGuy]

So close to home, damn.
WG

[CAHEK]

CANADA getting OWNED

[ElvisManson]

So I guess you could say Yahoo is getting Head.

[WiredGuy]

Originally posted by ElvisManson
So I guess you could say Yahoo is getting Head.