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Spambusters!

Who'da thunk it? A University of Texas student was part of the world's fourth largest spam operation. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has filed his first lawsuit based on Federal anti-spam legislation; defendant Ryan Pitylak from Austin and his California business partner, Mark Trotter, are accused of sending scam spams, emails with misleading subject, like "Re: your past due bills" or "Urgent: Household Loan Memorandum: Please Read." The actual messages were ads. The defendants had multiple companies. [Link]

The state's case is based on evidence gathered by Dewey Coffman, who runs Net-Sieve Inc., an Austin spam-filtering company. Coffman had been collecting spam in general since 2002 and started saving spam sent from Pitylak's company on a CD in September 2003. At one point, Coffman said he got about 12 to 15 e-mails a day from PayPerAction and Leadplex.

Microsoft Corp. also helped by setting up e-mail accounts to capture spam. From Feb. 18, 2004, until July 4, 2004, the Hotmail accounts received 42,000 e-mails from Pitylak's company, about 24,000 of which were illegal, according to the suit.

jon posted this at 7:43 AM
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