Risk: Informational
A British spammer breaching the terms of Microsoft's Hotmail service has been fined £45,000, which is reportedly the largest civil award against a spammer in Europe.
Paul Fox's spam emails intended to route traffic to his pornographic download site. By sending an email with a mobile phone number for recipients to call, he made an undisclosed amount of money. The conditions of using Hotmail state: "You may not use any [Microsoft] Services to send Spam. You also may not deliver Spam or cause Spam to be delivered to any of Microsoft's Services or customers."
A Microsoft spokesman said: "To evaluate the scale of the threat, on one day in April Microsoft sampled 20,000 of its 200m accounts and discovered 70 different Hotmail email accounts had been hit. Some were hit with over 250 emails on the one day. It was therefore a very high volume spam campaign."