The Computer Corner
Spammers fined US$236 million 
By Charles Miller

Here is a recap of a recent news article most of you probably missed, but are likely to find great joy in it. Late last month a US federal judge ordered an Arizona couple to pay more than US$236 million for sending spam email. After a four-year court battle, Henry Perez and his wife Suzanne Bartok were ordered to pay the damages, assessed at US$10 per bulk email.

According to a ruling by Judge John Jarvey of Iowa, the defendants used a program called “Bulk Mailing 4 Dummies” to send millions of unsolicited emails. The name of this program at once infringes on the publishing house that owns the “For Dummies” trademark and describes the recipients who read and respond to spam.

The background of this case is that the defendants, who ran a business called AMP Dollar Savings, were sued by Robert Kramer III, owner of CIS Internet Services, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Iowa.

CIS is a small-market ISP that was serving some five thousand customers in Iowa and Illinois. Starting in 2001, CIS gradually became inundated by unsolicited email that came from a variety of sources. By 2003, the company was processing about 500 million spam messages daily. The company was forced to pay for expensive server upgrades to handle the volume and to dedicate three servers exclusively to processing spam.

Kramer thinks he may have been hit with extra spam because his small company’s domain, cis.net, is confusingly similar to the cis.com once used by CompuServe.

Handling the spam reduced CIS’s bandwidth available to paying customers, making it harder for them to surf the web. Ultimately this caused CIS to lose customers as their client base dropped from about 5,000 customers in 2001 to just 1,200 in 2004.


With the future of its business thus threatened, the ISP turned to a qualified law firm for help. The lawyers monitored several email addresses and soon received a spam that advertised special low rates on mortgage refinancing. This led to a broker in California who, after being subpoenaed, told that AMP Dollar Savings had been hired to send out the spam email.

Through the discovery process they learned the database used by the spammers included 2,800,000 email addresses for customers of CIS in Iowa, even though at the time CIS actually had only about 5,000 customers. That error resulted in billions of extra spam the system had to handle and reject.

The defendants denied sending any of the spam and apparently tried to cover their tracks. Judge Jarvey wrote “The court simply does not believe Mr. Perez or Ms. Bartok. Their claim that they conveniently but inadvertently destroyed all the records of their company, just prior to being served with a civil action, rings hollow.”

The judgment in this case is a significant victory in the ongoing battle against spam. The court’s ruling holds the individuals personally responsible for paying the judgment, rather than applying only to the business they incorporated.

The salient point I hope all Atención readers will learn from this account is that spam emails are a huge and expensive problem for ISPs. Our lovely city of San Miguel de Allende is fortunate to be served by ISPs that are coping with the spam problem, but all are vulnerable to being overwhelmed as was the ISP in Iowa.

We can all do our small part by pledging to never read or respond to any spam email.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044 (415) 101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.