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The first fully defended anti-spam case in New Zealand history was heard in the Manukau District Court last July after the Department of Internal Affairs prosecuted an Auckland man for sending spam to a number of people in 2012.

It was also the first civil pecuniary penalty application (for the Electronic Messaging Compliance Unit) to be heard through to completion in the district court.

In 2012, Mr Zeljko Aksentijevic used several different email addresses to send 2230 commercial electronic messages to a large number of people, most of whom were members of an internet gaming forum.

The messages were largely abusive in nature and contained a link to Mr Aksentijevic’s free android game application “Crazy Tilt Arcade Challenge”.

On completion of its investigation, the Department found the messages to be in breach of the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act (the Act) by being unsolicited, not including accurate sender information, and not including a functional unsubscribe facility.

The court made its decision on the initial hearing in October 2014, and decided on the penalty in December 2014. The court agreed with the Department’s submissions, and Judge C S Blackie found Mr Aksentijevic had breached sections 9(1), 10, and 11(1)(a) of the Act and fined him $12,000.

Judge Blackie noted that the main purpose of the penalty was to deter Mr Aksentijevic and others from engaging in such conduct. The Department welcomed Judge Blackie’s decision, and believes it sends a strong message that those sending spam, even without financial motivation, can expect to be held accountable.

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short, is a method to improve or enhance your website’s standing in a search engine results.

Unfortunately, SEO and web design are popular topics amongst spammers and we have seen a particular spike in spam about SEO and web design over the last few months.

The messages often arrive from Gmail email addresses and are very broad in detail. The messages often purport to be from companies based in New Zealand, but the address details are vague and often do not exist. Some messages go as far as greeting the recipient with “Kia Ora”.

We would ask recipients of such messages to report them to scam@reportspam.co.nz.

The Department has seen a slow increase in the number of complaints relating to email messages promoting “crowd funding” efforts.

Crowd funding and crowd sourcing have gathered momentum over the past few years, and look to pool money or skillsets/knowledge from a large group of people to assist with a specific project.

A number of very successful projects have resulted from effective crowd funding and/or crowd sourcing. The results of such efforts can be enormous if done properly. Unfortunately, spamming people with your project idea and requesting money can quickly undo a project, be it big or small.

While crowd funding or crowd sourcing efforts are undertaken heavily via social media, email messaging is still a popular vehicle to try and reach out to target audiences. Such email can still be regarded as commercial electronic messages and subject to the provisions of the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007.

If you wish to send electronic messages to support your effort in obtaining money or knowledge, you should follow these simple rules:

• obtain consent from those to whom you wish to send messages
   
• include accurate sender details and contact information
   
• include a functional unsubscribe facility, and
   
• do not use address-harvesting software or a harvested-address list for sending crowd funding messages.

It is in your interest to keep your project’s reputation intact if you want it to be successful.

Our spam reporting service (SRS) is continuing to receive a good level of reporting from members of the public who have received unsolicited commercial SMS/TXT messages.

There is still a large amount of spam being sent to mobile devices around New Zealand, and the majority of the recent reports are related to “advance-fee fraud” and “new photo” messages.

Advance-fee fraud SMS/TXT messages refer to unsought messages which notify the recipient that they have won or are entitled to a certain amount of money (often a very large amount of money) through a lottery or competition.

Once the recipient engages with the group behind the message, they are asked for a “fee” to cover legal or postage fees before being able to receive the money, or “winnings”.

An example of an advance-fee fraud message that has been largely reported on is:

diamond @ bulkley . net GUINNESS – Your Phone Number won $1,500,000.00 in the GUINESS Promotions. For claim, send an email to outlook.guinness @ outlook . com

The “New Photo” messages have also been doing the rounds. This message is presented in the following form:

[Name of Person], you received (1) new photo message: [bit.ly url link]

The “bit.ly” shortened URL link redirects to a website which may show streamed video content, which may be of adult nature.

Recipients of mobile spam should remain cautious and forward the message(s) to 7726. People should not click any hyperlinks in spam; there is a danger that those hyperlinks could direct, or redirect, the recipient to websites which may cause malicious software to be downloaded to their device.