Amazon.com Inc has filed federal lawsuits against 11 e-mail marketers, contending they faked their e-mail addresses to appear as if the messages were sent by Amazon.com, the company said Tuesday.
The suits, filed Monday and Tuesday in several US district courts and in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Canada, seek injunctions to stop the alleged e-mail forgeries as well as millions of dollars in punitive damages.
The lawsuits are part of a broader effort by Amazon.com to stop e-mail "spoofing" of the company's name, the Seattle-based Internet retailer said in a statement. Spoofing is a practice in which outsiders send e-mail to consumers that purports to be from another company or person. Amazon.com, Internet auction site eBay Inc and other companies have long been targets of e-mail forgers.
In a related development, the New York Attorney General's Office on Tuesday announced a settlement with one alleged e-mail forger identified by Amazon.com. The company, EBA Wholesale Corp, which does business as Cyebye.com, has agreed to not use other companies' names in its marketing efforts, unless it has permission to do so. The Brooklyn, New York-based company also agreed to pay US$10,000 in penalties to the state of New York and is required to keep records of all commercial e-mail messages for the next two years.
Cyebye.com also has tentatively reached a separate settlement with Amazon, promising not to use the company's name in e-mails and agreeing to pay an undisclosed amount of money.
Amazon.com's lawsuits follow Microsoft Corp's June filing of 15 lawsuits against defendants in the US and UK. Microsoft is suing marketers who allegedly sent mass amounts of deceptive junk e-mail, called spam, but many spammers also spoof e-mail addresses to disguise themselves.
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