Spitzer, the crusader rages after spammers

Eliot Spitzer, the New York states attorney general who took on the worlds biggest banks such as Citigroup, CSFB and Merril Lynch to pay fines in excess of 1.1bn dollars for wrong advise, is now going after e-mail spammers. He has already lodged damage claim as much as $20m against the worlds biggest spammer - Colorado based businessman named Scott Richter.

Microsoft, which mounted an e-mail trap that laid the foundation for the case, said it had also lodged lawsuits, seeking fines of $18.8m. I
The claims were designed to bankrupt the spammer, Scott Richter, and scare others away from mounting the sort of illicit e-mail marketing blitzes that have bedeviled e-mail users, Mr Spitzer said.
Mr Richter is listed as the world's third-most prominent spammer by the Register of Known Spam Operations, a list maintained by the anti'-spam group Spamhaus.
Earlier this year, Mr Richter said: "People have to understand, we're a legitimate business. We are not the basement spammer." Along with a number of online pornography sites, he also claimed to run e-mail marketing campaigns on behalf of big companies.
According to Microsoft, however, Mr Richter was part of a ring of spammers who used a network of inter. net addresses around the world to cover their tracks, routing e-mail through computers based in 35 countries on six continents. Lawsuits were launched against other spammers said to 1 been part of the ring. Over a period of a m, earlier this year, Micrcosoft said it had caught £8,000e-mails from Mr Rich companies. These contained 40,000 fraudulent miss ments, said Mr Spitzer, ranging from forged seder names and false subject lines to inaccurate sender addresses and obscured transmission paths. Each misstatement is subject to a potential fine of $500 under New York's consumer protection laws, he added.
The investigation covered seven e-mail campaigns of which involved an effort to sell Viagara and another promoted a service that claimed to put people in touch with potential brides from Russia.
The legal action showed that spammers could not evade detection or liability by routing their e mail through overseas computers, Mr Spitzer said. "Most of the top spammers in the ~ world live in the US," added Smith, general counsel at Microsoft. "They can't avoid the long arm of the law by simply moving their computers offshore."
Mr Smith said co-operation, between technology companies and law enforce agencies was proving to be the most effective weapon against spammers, and that Microsoft hoped to be able mount similar actions in Europe in association with European authorities.