Small ISP wins in court, spammers must pay

Asis Internet Service, a smallish Californian ISP that counts only 4 employees, has 2.6 millions reason to celebrate.

The ISP filed a lawsuit against a company named “Find a Quote” and its CEO, for sending them 25,000 spam emails over a 18-month period. The judge ruled in favor of the plaintiff and awarded almost $2.6m in damages, although it’s doubtful they will ever see the money placed on their account.

The basis of the ruling was the well-known CAN-SPAM Act, which allows the magistrate to award damages that go up to $100 per spam message. The amount can even be tripled – if the judge deems it appropriate.

Asis originally asked for $3 million dollars, but are probably satisfied with what they received. Their own estimate about the cost of processing of spam emails is the following: $3,000 per month to process around 200,000 messages per day.

It only remains to hope that Asis will have better luck in extracting the money from the spammers than Facebook – whose court victory over a persistent spammer was marred by the fact that he had filed for bankruptcy and will probably never repay even a small percentage of the $711 millions he is supposed to.