Wayne Mansfield

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Wayne Mansfield
Born
Margaret River, Western Australia
Occupation Direct marketing
Children3

Wayne Mansfield, of Perth, Western Australia, was the head of direct marketing business T3 Direct Marketing, operating under a series of two-dollar companies, and in 2005 became the first Australian to be prosecuted for email spamming.

Contents

Spamming cases

Mansfield was a junk faxer in the mid-1990s before turning to spamming, in which he promoted seminar-hosting companies he ran, including The Maverick Partnership and Business Seminars Australia. These messages admitted he had harvested emails from "various publicly available sources and other marketing promotions", but included instructions for recipients to unsubscribe from the list.

T3 Direct was blacklisted along with the company in June 2002 by the Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS), along with its ISP, Swiftel (now People Telecom). Swiftel suspended T3 Direct's online access for this, and also violation of its terms of service. T3 Direct was left with A$4,578 in charges outstanding to Swiftel. However, Mansfield insisted that it was the other arm of his business, concerned with web design and the management of opt-in databases, which suffered as a result.

In July of the same year, Mansfield began legal action against Perth technician and anti-spam campaigner Joey McNicol. After receiving spam from Mansfield and discovering that the unsubscribe option did not work, and that contact details in the messages were fake, McNicol had set up a website publishing the details of T3 Direct and other Mansfield companies, as well as publishing these details in newsgroups. Mansfield accused McNicol of sending his company's IP address to SPEWS, prompting the blacklisting, but lost the case as he was unable to prove McNicol had actually contacted SPEWS, and in any case the action was not ruled to be illegal. Although Mansfield's company was ordered to pay McNicol's costs in the action, Mansfield shut down that company without paying those costs and continued business using a new company. McNicol's legal fees were in part paid by donations. [1] [2]

In August 2013, Mansfield was fined NZ$95,000 in New Zealand under the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 for the sending of unsolicited email communications. [3] [4] The case was brought by the Department of Internal Affairs (New Zealand) after it had received 53 complaints relating to unsolicited email from Mansfield and his entities between April and September 2010. [3]

In 2015 Mansfield has resumed spamming, this time using a not for profit charity "The Jindalee Foundation" in an attempt to skirt anti-spam laws.

Spam Act 2003

In June 2005 the then Australian Communications Authority (ACA) (Now known as the Australian Communications & Media Authority – ACMA) brought proceedings against Mansfield and his new company, Clarity1 under the recently passed Spam Act 2003 where ACMA alleged that they were involved in the sending of 56 million spam emails during 2004. He however insisted that sending commercial emails was his "right", but claimed he had not harvested any new email addresses since the Spam Act came into force, arguing that because he had started spamming the recipients before the Spam Act and the recipients had not unsubscribed, he could infer consent (an argument that did not find favour with the Court). He also stated that telephone operators at his company had been subjected to abuse by irate callers, but promised that unsubscribe requests were handled "within minutes". He defended his campaign, citing 20,000 attendees at his business seminars. [5] [6]

ACMA's complaint in this matter was upheld [7] in the Australia Federal Court on 13 April 2006. The Court imposed a penalty of A$4.5 million on Clarity1, and A$1 million on Wayne Mansfield, on 27 October 2006. [7]

Disqualified

In April 2009, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) disqualified Mansfield from managing corporations for four years following their investigation into his role in two failed companies. These companies were Clarity1 Pty Ltd, which was at the centre of the spam case, and The Which Company Pty Ltd. "ASIC found that the companies had failed with substantial statutory debts accrued over a substantial period and that Mr Mansfield's management and involvement in the affairs of Clarity1 Pty Ltd and Which Co Pty Ltd did not meet the standards required of a person in his position." [8]

See also

Related Research Articles

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Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose, or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly.

A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the list".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CAN-SPAM Act of 2003</span> American law to regulate bulk e-mail

The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 is a law passed in 2003 establishing the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail. The law requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions. Introduced by Republican Conrad Burns, the act passed both the House and Senate during the 108th United States Congress and was signed into law by President George W. Bush in December 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mobile phone spam</span> Unwanted communication through a mobile phone

Mobile phone spam is a form of spam, directed at the text messaging or other communications services of mobile phones or smartphones. As the popularity of mobile phones surged in the early 2000s, frequent users of text messaging began to see an increase in the number of unsolicited commercial advertisements being sent to their telephones through text messaging. This can be particularly annoying for the recipient because, unlike in email, some recipients may be charged a fee for every message received, including spam. Mobile phone spam is generally less pervasive than email spam, where in 2010 around 90% of email is spam. The amount of mobile spam varies widely from region to region. In North America, mobile spam steadily increased after 2008 and accounted for half of all mobile phone traffic by 2019. In parts of Asia up to 30% of messages were spam in 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email spam</span> Unsolicited electronic advertising by e-mail

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The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is an Australian government statutory authority within the Communications portfolio. ACMA was formed on 1 July 2005 with the merger of the Australian Broadcasting Authority and the Australian Communications Authority.

Trespass to chattels is a tort whereby the infringing party has intentionally interfered with another person's lawful possession of a chattel. The interference can be any physical contact with the chattel in a quantifiable way, or any dispossession of the chattel. As opposed to the greater wrong of conversion, trespass to chattels is argued to be actionable per se.

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The term opt-out refers to several methods by which individuals can avoid receiving unsolicited product or service information. This option is usually associated with direct marketing campaigns such as e-mail marketing or direct mail. A list of those who have opted out is called a Robinson list.

Email harvesting or scraping is the process of obtaining lists of email addresses using various methods. Typically these are then used for bulk email or spam.

Joey McNicol is an activist against E-mail spam. He became notable after a high-profile court case in which he was the defendant. The case alleged that he had caused IP addresses of companies controlled by Wayne Mansfield to be blacklisted. The case against him was dismissed in October 2002.

<i>Spam Act 2003</i>

The Spam Act 2003 (Cth) is an Act passed by the Australian Parliament in 2003 to regulate commercial e-mail and other types of commercial electronic messages. The Act restricts spam, especially e-mail spam and some types of phone spam, as well as e-mail address harvesting. However, there are broad exemptions.

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The history of email spam reaches back to the mid-1990s when commercial use of the internet first became possible - and marketers and publicists began to test what was possible.

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<i>CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc.</i>

CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc. was a ruling by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio in 1997 that set an early precedent for granting online service providers the right to prevent commercial enterprises from sending unsolicited email advertising – also known as spam – to its subscribers. It was one of the first cases to apply United States tort law to restrict spamming on computer networks. The court held that Cyber Promotions' intentional use of CompuServe's proprietary servers to send unsolicited email was an actionable trespass to chattels and granted a preliminary injunction preventing the spammer from sending unsolicited advertisements to any email address maintained by CompuServe.

<i>Gordon v. Virtumundo, Inc.</i>

Gordon v. Virtumundo, Inc., 575 F.3d 1040, is a 2009 court opinion in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit addressed the standing requirements necessary for private plaintiffs to bring suit under the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, or CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, 15 U.S.C. ch. 103, as well as the scope of the CAN-SPAM Act's federal preemption. Prior to this case, the CAN-SPAM Act's standing requirements had not been addressed at the Court of Appeals level, and only the Fourth Circuit had addressed the CAN-SPAM Act's preemptive scope.

Zorpia is a social networking service with customers in China. Zorpia is one of the few international social networks with a Chinese Internet Content Provider license. The social networking site reports 2 million unique users per month and a total worldwide user base of 26 million. Jeffrey Ng is the company's founder and CEO of Zorpia. The privately funded company is based in Hong Kong and has 30 employees.

A cold email is an unsolicited e-mail that is sent to a receiver without prior contact. It could also be defined as the email equivalent of cold calling. Cold emailing is a subset of email marketing and differs from transactional and warm emailing.

References

  1. ↑ "Mansfield plans appeal on spam case". The Age.
  2. ↑ Computerworld – Antispammer maintains fight after court victory
  3. 1 2 "Australian fined $95,000 for spamming". The Sydney Morning Herald. 14 August 2013. Retrieved 9 October 2013.
  4. ↑ "Spammer penalty welcomed". The Department of Internal Affairs, Government of New Zealand. Retrieved 9 October 2013.
  5. ↑ Internet marketeer faces spam charges – ZDNet UK
  6. ↑ "Australian Spam Act Nails First Spammer".
  7. 1 2 [2006] FCA 410
  8. ↑ ASIC disqualifies eight directors from managing corporations
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