PayPerAction spam firm ‘legit’
p2pnet.net News:- Leadplex and PayPerAction are legitimate Internet marketing companies in compliance with the federal law.
So claims the lawyer representing Ryan Pitylak and Mark Trotter, said by Texas attorney general Greg Abbott to be the fourth largest illegal spam operation in the world.
Texas is currently planning to nail Pitylak, a University of Texas at Austin student, and Trotter, from California, under the US Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM) with penalties of $250 per violation, up to $2 million.
PayPerAction operated more than 250 assumed names, “leading Internet users to believe they are being deluged by different companies soliciting for services,” says Abbott.
Lawyer Lin Hughes told the Houston Chronicle that Leadplex and PayPerAction are legitimate Internet marketing companies in compliance with the federal law.
He says Pitylak and Trotter sold their interests in the companies in March to Hong Kong-based Eastmark Technology Ltd., which is also named in the suit, and now have only a consulting relationship.
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See:-
legitimate – UT student sued for spamming, Houston Chronicle, January 13, 2005
planning to nail – Texas Student in CAN-SPAM case, p2pnet. January 14, 2004
January 16th, 2005 at 5:46 pm
i hope they nail these “spammers”. i, for one, am fed up with there useless junk e-mails. i have changed e-mails countless numbers of times to get an e-mail unaffected by virus “spam” messages that are misleading and are a waste of time. hurrah for microsoft and the AG of Texas.
January 16th, 2005 at 5:58 pm
We have a huge problem and just as long as the price is right it is going to continue no matter what.
One piece of legislation would have done it all. Make it illegal for companies to use such methods for marketing purposes. No money, no spam, nobody to pay the spammers.
The companies that are responsible for this electronic spam pushing should be treated the same as any other common criminal and unlike the spammers would be easy to catch.
January 16th, 2005 at 6:52 pm
These guys are taking their cues from large, well-established firms who have engaged in this kind of business for decades. The only difference is these guys are doing it electronically.
If you’ve ever closed on a mortgage, you know exactly what I mean. Almost immediately you’ll receive offers to insure your morgtage, get a home equity loan, even reduce you interest with a brand new mortgage. Ever wonder how all of these people know so much about you? Hint: your data has been sold.
So what’s the solution, throw guys like these in jail for doing the same thing that countless companies have done for countless years? I don’t think so.
If you don’t like what they send you, delete it and go about your life. Do you complain to the Post Office when you get too much mail? If you spend your time complaining about getting too much mail, electronic or otherwise, maybe you should consider taking up a hobby.
January 16th, 2005 at 7:15 pm
Whether you realize or not,you can complain to the post office about “junk mail’ and they will actually filter it for you.
So dude,find another analogy.
January 16th, 2005 at 7:45 pm
> If you don’t like what they send you, delete it and go about your life.
The good old “Just hit delete” argument….
Please! It’s not 1995 anymore. We are not speaking of 3 or 4 e-mails per day.
I receive 700 to 800 e-mails a day: 70% are spam. I should not have to “just hit delete” 400 to 500 times a day.
And for your (flawed) Post Office analogy, what would YOU do if you were receiving a full truck of junk mail every morning?
January 16th, 2005 at 7:57 pm
The Post Office absolutely refuses to filter junk mail for you. I’ve tried to get them not to deliver bulk supermarket ads and such, and they say no, they’ve been paid to deliver them, so they’ll deliver them, and if I don’t want them I need to contact the senders directly (ok, I’m too lazy to do that
They’ll send Postal Inspectors if you complain about unsolicited obscene mail, but that’s about it.
They’re annoyingly hypocritical, though – if you want to use a mailbox from another mailbox company, they say they’ll refuse to deliver your mail to that mailbox unless you prove to them that you’re really using the name on the mailbox, give them your True Name, the address of where you sleep, etc. and two pieces of ID. The senders of First Class Mail pay more per piece than the senders of bulk mail, but the P.O. will refuse to deliver the First Class mail that you want and refuse NOT to deliver the junk mail that you don’t want.
January 16th, 2005 at 8:05 pm
The law has potentially large penalties, but it’s so hopelessly easy to satisfy the conditions for being Not Spam that some anti-spam activists call it the YOU-CAN-SPAM law. There are spammers that make an effort to satisfy those conditions and then claim they’re legit, though most spammers don’t bother, and the worst case for a spammer that doesn’t want to bother with that is that they have to spend $100 to set up a pre-fab Delaware corporation and use it to do their spamming, so if they get busted their corporation gets all of its nonexistent assets confiscated to pay the fine and they have to spend $100 on a new corporation the next time.
An old proposed anti-spam law that didn’t pass, S.1618, was actually much more useful, because spammers used to put lies in the bottom of their spam saying “According to Senate Bill S.1618, this message is Not Spam.”, and you could set your email filters to delete anything with “S.1618″ in it.
January 16th, 2005 at 9:43 pm
hang ‘em
January 16th, 2005 at 9:48 pm
disembowl ‘em first
January 17th, 2005 at 11:03 am
Lets examine the facts.
There is NO line of defense possible. The spammers are operating illegally. PERIOD! The subject lines are false and misleading. The return (sending) email addresses are false. Some spammers even use legal addresses of other people so that innocent people catch all of the negative feedback and bounced messages. Besides; the spammers never use their own mailservers anyway. They simply hijack open mail servers that they dont pay for and send their spam at someone elses expense. Now they can even send mail through YOUR highspeed mailserver if your computer is contaminated with one of their programs.
These particular spammers operated under 250 “made up” business names. All of these supposed business names are illegally registered giving false registration information, often on overseas servers.
If these guys claim to be “legitimate” what is the need to hide behind so many lies? The obvious answer is that they are NOT legitimate and are not operating within the law and its a very weak law at best.
Even assuming that they complied with an “opt out” request, if you factor in the matter that they are operating under 250 assumed names, you would need to “opt out” 250 times.
Spam is in NO way similar to postal mail solicitation. Even though the postal rates are reduced for “bulk” mail, the mailers still have to pay for the mailing and the printing costs. Spam costs NOTHING to “print” and nothing to send as it is using hijacked resources that are paid for by someone else. If the analogy applied to postal mail, it would be as though the advertising was printed for free was dumped into the postal truck for free, and the mailman was required to deliver it with postage due.
The fact that most spam is promoting things which are often a scam within themselves is another matter. Tracking and attempting to prosecute these matters is virtually impossible. The pricetag of doing so, is a price we ALL pay for.
No matter what the outcome and penalty is in this case, it is no where near enough. Spam is illegal by its very nature and should be MADE illegal. The ONLY legal emailing is one that I specificly ASK for and agree to and can confirm such an agreement from my own mailbox address. Its one that I can opt out from at ANY time as well.
It has to come from a legal sender with a legal address of contact. Anything short of that should be ILLEGAL.
January 18th, 2005 at 3:13 pm
I was designed that way. Congress was forced to pass something, so Congress members got together with their Direct Marketing Association buddies and wrote something that would satisfy the DMA. Now, Congress win because it can say it passed a spam law, and spammers win because they can keep spamming. The only way to defeat spamming is to take retalitory action such as using SpamFryer.jar and other like tools.