The anti-spam project known as project honey pot has filed in the US a lawsuit under the CAN-SPAM act to attempt to recover 1 Billion Dollars from Email Harvesters and Comment Spammers. 

The lawsuit has been filed in the Eastern District of Virginia and is seeking damages for spam and email address harvesting targeted at the Project's members. The suit was filed against the entire universe of John Doe defendants using any of the 2,593,657 IP addresses captured by Project Honey Pot over the past two years, and seeks potentially more than $1 billion in statutory damages under the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act and the State of Virginia's Anti-Spam statute.

Project Honey Pot is represented by Jon Praed of the Washington, D.C. based Internet Law Group. Mr. Praed and the ILG have been responsible for some of the leading anti-spam prosecutions including Verizon Online v. Alan Ralsky, AOL v. CN Productions, and AOL v. Cyber Entertainment Network.

"Project Honey Pot's community-based approach has been critical to developing a suit of this scope," explained Mr. Praed. "It is important to remember that this is a group of volunteers who have pooled their resources in order to gather the data necessary to go after the worst spammers in the world. This is literally the Internet community as a whole standing up and saying, 'We're sick of spam, and it's high time we do something about it!'"

The lawsuit represents the first time existing anti-spam laws have been used to challenge the practice of email harvesting, something CAN-SPAM imposes enhanced penalties for. Spammers use spiders that trawl the Internet for addresses build their email lists, without the data gathered by Project Honey Pot it will have been a challenge for anyone to bring a suit against anyone.

Although the lawsuit doesn’t currently name directly any defendants it will serve at this time an effective means to force the disclosure of the real culprits from the ISPs that the harvesters and spammers hide behind.

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