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Amazon.com, Microsoft team up against online fraud
28 September, 2004
Amazon.com and Microsoft announced Tuesday the filing of
several lawsuits against phishers and spammers who targeted
consumers by spoofing Amazon.com's domain name and perpetrating
phishing scams with spoofed Amazon.com Web sites. The two
Seattle-area neighbors have worked together to identify the
architects of these schemes, and indicated they are collaborating
to test possible technical solutions that would make it more
difficult to deliver fraudulent and deceptive e-mail to consumers.
Amazon.com and Microsoft filed a joint federal lawsuit against
a Canadian spamming operation allegedly responsible for sending
millions of deceptive e-mail messages, including e-mail forgeries
falsely purporting to have come from Amazon.com, Hotmail.com
and other domains (a practice called "spoofing").
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Seattle, alleges
that Gold Disk Canada Inc., located in Kitchener, Ontario,
along with co- defendants including Barry Head and his two
sons, Eric and Matthew, mounted illegal and deceptive spamming
campaigns that have misused Microsoft's MSN Hotmail services
and forged the name of Amazon.com.
"Spoofing," using a forged e-mail address, is an
illegal online marketing scheme that conceals a sender's true
identity and falsely identifies someone else as the sender.
"Phishing" is more overt fraud, designed to steal
credit card and other financial information from its victims.
Phishers send fraudulent e-mail that is disguised to look
as though it comes from a respected company. The e-mail message
either asks recipients for confidential financial information
or directs recipients to a Web site -- designed to mimic a
trusted Web site -- where they are asked to input private
personal data such as login information, passwords and credit
card numbers.
The companies allege Gold Disk peddled a large range of products
"Human Growth Hormone, cable descramblers, penis enlargement
products, debt consolidation, merchant card processing services
and other goods and services of questionable value."
They also alleged Gold Disk opened thousands of MSN Hotmail
accounts and sent fewer than 100 unsolicited e-mails through
each of those accounts in a conscious effort to avoid detection
by Microsoft.
In addition to the lawsuit filed jointly with Microsoft,
Amazon.com filed another three lawsuits in King County Superior
Court in Seattle against unidentified defendants allegedly
involved in phishing schemes designed to defraud Amazon.com
customers. Microsoft, too, filed a new and separate lawsuit
against Leonid ("Leo") Radvinsky and his Chicago-based
businesses Activsoft, Inc., and Cybertania, Inc., along with
several additional unidentified defendants against whom Amazon.com
filed suit in August 2003. The lawsuit alleges that Radvinsky
sent millions of illegal and deceptive e-mail messages to
MSN Hotmail customers, including messages that were falsely
labeled as coming from Amazon.com.
"Today's alliance should be yet another wake-up call
for spammers and phishers that the industry is teaming up,
pooling resources and sharing investigative information to
put them out of business," said Brad Smith, general counsel
for Microsoft. "We are pleased to be working closely
with Amazon.com to find creative and effective solutions that
make it harder for spammers to continue this kind of deception."
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