Canada's former spam king, Eric Head, whose lawyer said he quit the bulk e-mail trade to play drums in a rock band at 25, is again being sued by U.S. companies for clogging cyberspace with unsolicited pitches for such things as cable descramblers, penis enlargers and debt-consolidation loans.
This time, the Kitchener, Ont., man is also accused of using the trademark of Amazon.com Inc. in countless messages to imply falsely that they were sent or endorsed by the on-line marketing giant, a practice called spoofing.
It is unclear whether the alleged abuses, if they occurred, continued past mid-June, when Mr. Head settled a lawsuit with California-based Yahoo Inc. partly by expressing “deep regret” for any inconvenience he caused and urging all bulk e-mailers to cease operations unless they obeyed new U.S. anti-spam laws.
“Eric is out of business,” his Los Angeles lawyer, Huey Cotton, said at the time. “He's going to play in a band and find a way to use his knowledge to help protect kids on the Internet.”
“And all that is true,” Mr. Cotton said Tuesday, “so these allegations are relating to old news.”
The new suit was filed in Seattle this week by Amazon.com and Microsoft Corp., the world's biggest software company, which alleges that its Hotmail service was burdened with hundreds of millions of messages and that hundreds of thousands of Hotmail accounts were opened under fictitious names as covert spam channels.
The suit gives no time frame except to allege that the activity had begun by Jan. 1, 2003. “I don't know if it was occurring after June of 2004,” Microsoft lawyer Aaron Kornblum said Tuesday.
David Zapolsky, vice-president and associate general counsel of Amazon.com, said: “The short answer is we have no idea whether there's any truth to Mr. Head's [June] statement. Even if it were true, it wouldn't affect the scope or nature of the lawsuit.”
Mr. Cotton said he is again defending Mr. Head and that his client would not discuss the case. “I think the only comment we'd make right now is that Eric Head and his companies have been out of business for quite some time.”
Also named in the suit are Mr. Head's father, Barry, his brother, Matthew, and his Kitchener-based e-mail service, Gold Disk Canada Inc. “To the extent these allegations are directed at Barry Head and Matthew Head, they are completely baseless because they weren't in the business,” Mr. Cotton said.
Microsoft's Mr. Kornblum was not in a forgiving mood.
“The spam that Microsoft customers received, particularly the spoofing scam, was very elaborate and quite deceptive. Additionally, in our complaint, we've alleged that Gold Disk violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the CFAA, through opening multiple MSN Hotmail accounts. That is the focus of Microsoft's investigation and complaint in the case,” he said.
The suit alleges that the defendants opened large numbers of Hotmail accounts in order to send fewer than 100 messages from each, a technique that thwarted anti-spam technology while “resulting in a collective daily spamming of millions of messages.”
It also alleges that the messages featured phony subject and “from” lines, familiar spammer tactics that now violate U.S. laws. It is illegal “to include false or misleading subject lines or to falsify headers that do not accurately reflect how the message was transmitted,” Mr. Kornblum said.
Separately, Amazon.com filed three lawsuits against U.S. defendants it accuses of what is called phishing, a practice in which people are persuaded to entrust personal data, including credit-card information, to phony websites made to look like those of companies they deal with.
