Project Honey Pot Files Massive Anti-Spam Suit Against Millions of IP Addresses

An anti-spam organization that collected millions of spam messages sent to fake email addresses seeded on volunteers' websites and blogs filed a lawsuit against every spammer who harvested those addresses and spammed them. The suit, filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, seeks more than $1 billion in damages. The suit names John Doe defendants based on their IP addresses.

From Project Honey Pot's press release:

"Our members have one thing in common: they all want spam to stop," said Matthew Prince, co-founder of Project Honey Pot and CEO of Unspam Technologies, Inc. "Aided by the vast amount of data our community of volunteers has helped gather, as well as the top legal minds in the anti-spam world, we are bringing this fight to the spammers. This suit will make them slither out from under the rocks where they're hiding."

The Washington Post's Brian Krebs weighs in here. In interests of full disclosure, my old blog Secondary Screening used the Honey Pot project's code, though the code is no longer on the site. I haven't checked the stats on how many times email addresses were harvested from my site, but I'm guessing it will be enough to make me millions from this settlement, and am currently shopping for a small island on Thailand's west coast.

UPDATE: I still have my login and password – 115 spam harvesters visited my old blog, resulting in more than 8,500 spam emails. I think I'll be able to buy two islands. Snapshot of the statistics page after the jump.

Photo: Indigo Goat