Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott on Thursday sued a University of Texas student who is ranked by watchdog groups as one of the world's biggest spammers. The federal complaint says that Ryan Pitylak and his California business partner, Mark Trotter, sent out huge volumes of illegal spam through three companies: PayPerAction LLC, Leadplex LLC and Leadplex Inc. Dewey Coffman, who runs an Austin Internet service company, helped in the investigation by setting up "trap" e-mail accounts to capture the spam sent by Pitylak's companies. Microsoft Corp. did the same. In six months, those efforts captured 24,000 illegal emails sent by Pitylak's companies, Abbott said.
Pitlak and Trotter set up PayPerAction in 2002, which has operated with more than 250 assumed names, Abbott said. Using those names, the company sent out huge volumes of e-mails with allegedly false and deceptive headers to trick recipients into opening them, the state's lawsuit says. The recipients, believing they were responding to legitimate messages, sometimes provided additional information, not realizing that PayPerAction was selling the information to other companies for as much as $28 per sales lead. Sending commercial e-mails with deceptive or misleading headers is illegal under a federal law designed to curb the rise of spam. "Spam is one of the most aggravating and pervasive problems facing consumers today," Abbott said. "Texans are fed up, and today's action aims to give them relief by shutting down one of the world's worst spam operations." |