Spam Wars - The spammer lost in court, but will they pay?
It's arrived, the County Court Judgement against the spammers known as Cybernet Media Limited and Chris Mortimer. The court awarded me £100 in compensation and a further £325 in costs (£425 in total). The big question now is will they pay? They have until the 28th February.
I admit this still isn't really what I wanted. In the original court documents I asked for two things.
Firstly, for them to pay the charges I told them I expected them to pay if they continued to send spam - at a rate of £50 + VAT per email. The judge said he couldn't award that because it didn't reflect the costs their breaking the PECR regulations incurred me. In his words, I could have asked for a million pounds per email and it wouldn't be a valid claim. If however those particular emails had stopped our system working and the repair had cost a million pounds then that would be allowable. I'm not unhappy with the judges decision, it's perfectly logical, but I understand why others don't bother trying to stop spammers - it's simply not worth the time.
Secondly, I asked for them to put in writing that they would stop sending the spam and follow the regulations. The judge couldn't order that (not within his powers) and as we know from reading the comments of my earlier posts Cybernet Media continue to send spam, not because they don't know the regulations, just they choose to ignore them.
I'll update the blog if there are any developments.
Hi Steve - did they ever pay up? Getting annoyed with this "company' myself....
Not yet.... so late last year I started the next stage of the court process. They'll be hearing from their local court shortly and I'll post an update when I hear more.
Lol I just came across this post. Cybernet have cold called our company a few times in regards to SEO and this last time regarding a PPC campaign I run on our company.
The basically tried selling me a service which will block all the IPs from competing companies so they can’t click on our ads.
This is quite easy to do in Adwords and also using other tools but the problem is getting your competitors IP address. I asked him how they acquire it, and he said "Thats what we do it’s our job" so I asked again how exactly they acquire the IP address and he fobbed me off again. When I said I wasn't interested in the service he got angry at me saying do I not want to save money! I explained we only spend £100 a month and most of our enquiries come through organic listings. He then tried to say we don’t have any organic listings and refused to believe the examples I gave!!!
What an idiot. While it is easy to capture IP addresses how does he honestly think he can get ALL my competitors IPs?