Tech Shout!

A Small Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the town of Clinton, Iowa, has just won one of the largest payouts ever extracted from a spammer.

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

A lawsuit claimed that McCalla sent over 280 million illegal spam e-mail messages. Frims advertised in the spam had already been instructed to pay up a billion dollars in damages.

CIS was entitled to $10 per illegal e-mail, argued the prosecutors keeping in mind the state law in effect at the time.

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 mask 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.