Yahoo Files Lawsuit Against 'Lottery Spammers'

Yahoo on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against an unknown group of spammers who had used the Yahoo name to try and obtain personal and financial information from its victims. According to a report from the Associated Press, the emails claimed to be a part of a lottery run by Yahoo in which the recipients could win between a few thousand to a million dollars, on the condition that they click a provided link to hand over valuable personal and financial information to a "Yahoo lottery coordinator."

Joe Siino, Yahoo's senior vice president of Yahoo global intellectual properties and business strategy said on the topic: "The unauthorized use of Yahoo's trademarks is misleading, fraudulent, and has actually confused, misled, and deceived the public."

The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Yahoo is claiming the "lottery spammers" violated the Federal Trademark Act by claiming to be Yahoo and also for violated the Federal CAN-SPAM Act.

Though recent lawsuits like the MySpace victory over "Spam Kings" Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines give hope that Yahoo will succeed, there is the unfortunate complication that the identities of the Yahoo spammers are unknown. Yahoo hopes that the identities of the spammers will be revealed during the upcoming discovery period of the lawsuit investigation.

It's always good to see a company trying to protect its customers from frauds and scams, hopefully this attempt won't be in vain and the spammers didn't cover their virtual tracks as well as they thought.

Comments

i have received many many emails in my Yahoo box pertaining lotteries sponsered by Yahoo, Microsoft and so on and i would to truly love to eliminate all lottery emails because i am truly tired of seeing them in my inbox and is there someone or an organization that i may be able to forward these scam lottery emails to, thank you

ahmenra

May 29, 2008

12:24 PM PT

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