Spammer lands $11 billion fine

A SMALL ISP in the town of Clinton, Iowa, has just won one of the largest payouts ever extracted from a spammer.

The firm, CIS Internet Services, won $11.2 billion from James McCalla, from Florida, who was found to have sent millions of unsolicited e-mails advertising mortgage and debt consolidation services through the ISP's network.

A lawsuit claimed that McCalla sent more than 280 million illegal spam e-mail messages. Firms advertised in the spam had already been ordered to cough up a billion dollars in damages.

Prosecutors argued that under state law in effect at the time, CIS was entitled to $10 per illegal e-mail.

The Iowa court was told the defendants "falsely and illegally" represented that their e-mails originated from the CIS domain. The e-mails used the cis.net as a return address to disguise the source of the e-mails to avoid complaints.

CIS acknowledged that it is unlikely to see any of the judgement money but said that it was time that spammers learnt that their actions would result in an economic death penalty.

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