Law Firm Spammers

Mike at Crime and Federalism recently wrote of spam email he received from a lawyer soliciting his membership in a referral network of some sort. Today, I got spammed with a mass solicitation trawling the Internet for anybody who knows anybody who has used Vioxx:
That spam was sent through "av-double.com", which claims to build permission-based "email marketing solutions". Yeah, right. Permission. That must be why they offer no information about their sponsor or services on their website, which is registered to what seems to be a fake address.

The site behind the ads is thelegalleadsnetwork.com, which is registered anonymously. The site does include an address - The Legal Leads Network, Inc., 14545 J. Military Trail #137 Delray Beach, FL 33484 , USA - which is a post office box at a UPS Store. But the site is mirrored at vioxx-legal-center.com, and beyond the other similar anonymously registered legal lead generator sites, that site's server hosts a website registered to one "Arthur Frischman" of "PCSecurityShield, Inc.". A couple of years ago, Mr. Frischman was lamenting the CanSpam Act:

Now comes the fun part. The FTC is going to make an example out of someone. It certainly will be a lot easier to make an example out of NextAisle, if we didn't perfect the art of suppression lists, than it would be to track down some hard-core spammer sitting in cybercafe in Indonesia. Let's hope that the FTC opts for the hard-core spammer.

For those of us that derive revenue from email, the reality of all this is that we are in for a tough few months. Soon, we will all understand this law better, adjust to it and move on and the email industry will come back strong and probably a whole lot cleaner. Mark my words.

Cleaner? Yeah, right.

But who is buying his leads?