Twitter is seeking from the defendants compensation for costs incurred to detect, monitor, and fight spam, as well as respond to user complaints and inquiries regarding spam. Specifically, Twitters is seeking not less than $100,000 from Lucero, $75,000 from Harris, $75,000 from TweetAdder, $300,000 from TweetBuddy, and $150,000 from TweetAtttacks, Twitter said in the lawsuit filed in US district court in San Francisco.
The company is also seeking an injunction from the court to shut down the alleged spammers.
“While many legitimate companies have growth their businesses through Twitter, the service has also become an unwilling host to unscrupulous entities which exhibit a variety of abusive behaviors on Twitter. Such behaviors are referred to as ‘spam,’ a term borrowed from the popular word for unsolicited commercial email messages. Examples of ‘spam’ include posting a Tweet with a harmful link (including links to phishing or malware sites) and abusing the @reply and @mention function to post unwanted messages to a user”, Twitter explained in the complaint.
Paul Ducklin, head of technology, Asia Pacific, at Sophos, praised Twitter for filing the lawsuit. “Taking a public stand against those who abuse our goodwill online by bombarding us with unsolicited and unwanted messages, and against those who offer software and services to make this sort of bombardment easy, is to be commended”, he wrote in a blog.