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Anti-Spam Suits Add Up in Washington

December 17, 2001
Earn money at home reading spam. That might be Bennett Haselton's new battle cry. The Bellevue, WA, man earned $2,000 in small claims court recently after suing four people who sent him deceptive e-mail solicitations that are illegal in Washington state.

The judge found in Haselton's favor in four separate cases for $500 apiece. None of the defendants bothered to show up.

The four cases all involved spam in which the sender used a false e-mail address in the "from" field, prohibited in Washington. One was a chain letter asking for five dollars from an amateur in Indiana who used his real name. Two were from professional spamming companies hawking their services. And the last was a company offering seminars on how to make money on the stock market.

Haselton started filing suits in small claims court in June, immediately after the law was upheld. He has about 30 other cases winding through the system. His costs for each case consist of the filing fee, $21. No attorney is required in small claims.

Although he was victorious in these four specific cases, Haselton said it isn't as easy as it looks. Some judges told him small claims court was the wrong venue, and others told him the law only allows him to recover damages, of which there were none.

Haselton is not the only one papering the courts with spamming suit. Martin Palmer claims to have collected over $18,000 from spammers, mostly through out-of-court settlements.

Bruce Miller, a free-lance writer from Seattle, was the first person to collect money under the new law, through an out-of-court settlement in 1998. Since then he's collected $4,000 in total, and has set up a Web site to show others how.

One important source of assistance has been the Washington State Attorney General's office, which, besides defending the constitutionality of the law, has set up a Web site on how to fight spam.

Although 19 states have anti-spam laws of some kind, only a few of them allow private citizens to sue in small claims court as they can in Washington state.

The spambusters movement is largely based on an older effort to fight so-called "junk faxes."

Under a little-known federal law passed in 1991, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, it is illegal to fax an advertisement without permission, anywhere in the United States. Under the law, those who receive a fax can sue the company advertised (not the junk-faxing company) for up to $1,500 in small claims court.

Rodney Joffe, a marketing executive from Phoenix who got fed up with junk faxes, has won nine junk fax cases in small claims court this year, all but one of the judgments for $1,500. He has five more cases pending.

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