Yahoo said today it sued a bunch of John and Jane Does for fraudulently using the Yahoo brand for criminal purposes.
The doozie of a lawsuit alleges that "lottery spammers" have dragged Yahoo's good name into an old scheme that basically works like this: So-called lottery spammers send out thousands of emails that claim recipients have won prizes (see example, right), but in order to claim it, they must send in their bank account number, password, etc. When the recipient sends back the information, they're charged all sorts of inexplicable fees for a prize they're never going to receive.
"The unauthorized use of Yahoo!'s trademarks is misleading, fraudulent, and has actually confused, misled, and deceived the public. Yahoo! will vigorously enforce its intellectual property rights and will not tolerate lottery hoax emails," said Joe Siino, senior vice president for Yahoo! global IP and business strategy, in a prepared statement.
And while Yahoo doesn't yet know the identities of the spammers, it hopes it can find them by subpoenaing "email service providers, such as EarthLink and GoDaddy."
The one thing that strikes us as a little curious here is the timing of the lawsuit. These scams have been around almost as long as the internet -- why would Yahoo finally decide to sue now? It probably has something to do with a $234 million judgment for MySpace in a case against "spam king" Sanford Wallace. The judgment, believed to be the largest anti-spam award, came shortly before Yahoo filed its complaint on May 16.
Still, the chances that Yahoo will ever see a dime on this case -- assuming it wins -- are questionable. It's hard enough to collect from a domestic spammer, it's bound to be significantly more challenging if the spammer is working from outside the U.S. -- and in our experience, most lottery emails seem to come from overseas.
"If you think it’s hard to collect from some guy operating anonymously out of Las Vegas, good luck trying to collect from some guy in Algiers," says Ben Clark, an intellectual property attorney and partner at Bryan Cave, in St. Louis. "The lawsuit may be sustainable, but any effort to enforce the judgment becomes much more difficult when [the defendants are] overseas."
