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Anti-Spam Company Files Billion Dollar Spam Lawsuit

Unspam Technologies is living up to its name. The anti-spam company Thursday filed a lawsuit in Virginia against unnamed spammers for violating the Can-Spam Act and the Virginia Computer Crimes Act.

The lawsuit seeks more than $1 billion in damages on behalf of the members of Project Honey Pot, a distributed spam identification system run by Unspam that gathers spam data from decoy e-mail addresses -- honeypots -- and then shares information to assist spam identification.

Attorney Jon Praed is representing Unspam. He's the founding partner of the Internet Law Group and has represented Verizon and AOL in past lawsuits against notorious spammers.

Praed says that the complaint puts at issue all of the spam Project Honey Pot has received. That's 6.1 million spam messages received between January 2005 and April 2006, according to the court filing, which puts the number of spam servers in Virginia at more than 20,000.

"We don't know yet and can't know how many individuals are responsible," said Praed, adding that once the spammers are identified, the number of defendants will likely prove surprisingly small.

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