In case you haven’t heard…
There’s a zillion billion news stories going around about MySpace filing suit against Scott Richter who is fairly well known as the “Spam King”. He picked up that name after owning a clothing line that used it (in violation of someones trademark, naturally) and for… Well, being one of the biggest shit-bags to ever grace the net with massive loads of spam.
The suit filed by MySpace alleges that Richter and his company; OptInRealBig which is the parent company of the CPAEmpire.com CPA network, has been spamming MySpace users via bulletins from phished accounts. This isn’t shocking news to me since I busted someone sending traffic to CPAEmpire affiliate links in that exact fashion over a month ago.
If the rumor mill is correct, Scott Richter is simply the beginning of this. Apparently, MySpace plans to file similar suits against over 20 ad networks. Since that suit against Richter has been filed, this is no surprise either.
The below are some excepts from a email convo I had with a MySpace employee back in June of 2006. He initiated the correspondence after reading something I wrote about the adult webcam spam (NSFW) that’s extremely popular on MySpace.
“I’m curious what advice you have for us? We have a good team on it, but don’t have the inside perspective you do ”
“My idea is extremely simple: Sue them. And, have them reprimanded any way you can from a criminal standpoint… You guys have a ton of claims that could be made… negative effect on your brand, hurts your CPM rates, ruins user experience, etc.”
Well, it looks like they’re finally going to be smart about this. Or, are they? There’s some major issues that come along with the “sue the bastards” approach…
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