AOL v. Over the Air Equipment Press Release - 10/2/97

DULLES, VA, October 2, 1997 - America Online took its battle against unsolicited bulk e-mail - also known as junk e-mail or spam - to federal court this week with a suit against Over the Air Equipment, Inc., a company based in Las Vegas, Nevada, which has repeatedly sent unsolicited junk e-mail to AOL members despite repeated requests from AOL not to do so. According to
the suit, Over the Air Equipment used deceptive practices, including falsifying e-mail transmission data, to avoid AOL's mail controls and to repeatedly transmit vast quantities of unsolicited e-mail to AOL members.

E-mail sent to AOL members from Over the Air Equipment included a link to their cyber-stripper offerings on the World Wide Web. To further confuse AOL subscribers, Over the Air Equipment copied an America Online trademark fraudulently suggesting that their site had AOL's approval.

"Today we're saying to junk e-mailers: You will finally have to take responsibility for your deceptions, your trickery, and your counterfeiting," said George Vradenburg, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of America Online. "We're committed to providing our members with a positive online
experience - as free as possible from unwanted junk e-mail that clogs our members' mail boxes and hawks everything from get-rich-quick schemes to adult entertainment."

The AOL suit claims that despite repeated demands to Over the Air Equipment to cease and desist, the company continued to use a variety of deceptive practices including forging e-mail headers and counterfeiting routing information to escape detection.

In this suit, AOL also charges that Over the Air Equipment blatantly ignored AOL member requests to be removed from Over the Air Equipment's spamming lists and continued to transmit unwanted junk e-mail to
frustrated AOL members.

"Not only did Over the Air Equipment continually send e-mail deceptively designed to avoid AOL mail controls -- they went so far as to illegally copy the AOL trademark in an effort to suggest falsely that we actually condoned their activities and their content on the Web," Vradenburg continued. "Today's action is another significant step in our continued effort to protect our members from the deceptive and fraudulent practices of junk e-mailers."

Today's action is part of AOL's continuing strategy to fight spam both in the courts and with new technologies. In February, ruling on an AOL-filed suit, a
federal court in Philadelphia ordered CyberPromotions, Inc., a notorious spamming operation, to cease using fictitious and unregistered domain addresses to send unsolicited e- mail to AOL member addresses. The court also ordered CyberPromotions to comply promptly with AOL members' requests for removal from its mailing lists, through the e-mail reply command.

America Online, Inc., based in Dulles, Virginia, is the world's leading Internet online service, with over 9 million members worldwide. AOL, founded in 1985,
offers its subscribers a wide variety of interactive services including electronic mail, Instant Message features, entertainment, reference, financial information, computing support, interactive magazines and newspapers, as well as easy access to all the services of the Internet.