Amazon.com, Microsoft Team Against Online Fraud

September 2004

Amazon.com, Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced 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 Washington companies have teamed up in an attempt to eliminate e-mail scams that affect Internet users worldwide including customers of both companies. The two Seattle-area neighbors have worked together to identify the architects of these schemes, and 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.