Yahoo wins millions from fake lottery spammers

INTERNET SEARCH PORTAL Yahoo is a little bit richer this morning after it was awarded $610m from spammers who were running a fake lottery scheme.

Fake lottery schemes are those annoying email messages that suggest that you have come into a lot of money, you probably see those all the time. In the Yahoo scheme email messages were sent to internet users that said that they had won money from Yahoo itself.

This unsolicited email that offers a prize for a competition that no one has entered soon turns into a personal and financial data harvest. This then provides the scamming spammers with enough information to open up fake accounts, get fake personal identification, and spend other peoples' money.

Yahoo might have been sick of people turning up at its offices demanding large cheques, we don't know. But we do know that a court order was handed down by a US District Court judge in New York on Monday in its favour.

"Yahoo! takes the protection if its users and its brand very seriously," said Christian Dowell, legal director of global brand protection. "Our ultimate goal is to ensure that users continue to trust Yahoo! as the leading U.S. email provider."

The $610m is made up of a statutory damages award for trademark infringement of $27m, and a statutory damages award for violation of the CAN-SPAM Act of $583m. Yahoo was also awarded its attorney fees. µ