AOL v. Squeaky Clean Marketing Press Release - 12/18/97

On the heels of its victory against Over the Air Equipment, the Company also announced that it has filed another suit against a junk e-mailer. This lawsuit, filed in the Circuit Court of Fairfax County, Virginia, alleges that Squeaky Clean Marketing and Cyber Services, both based in Dallas, GA, ignored repeated requests by AOL to stop sending unsolicited junk e-mail to AOL members. AOL charges the Squeaky Clean Marketing and Cyber Services have sent millions of pieces of junk e-mail to AOL members resulting in thousands of AOL member complaints.

E-mails from Squeaky Clean Marketing and Cyber Services peddle everything from baldness cures to get-rich-quick schemes. The companies even sell do-it-yourself spamming software to enable other "entrepreneurs" to bombard AOL members with unsolicited junk e-mail. AOL's suit also charged that both Squeaky Clean Marketing and Cyber Services are employing deceptive mailing practices to evade AOL's junk mail filters, including falsifying e-mail headers and relaying e-mails through third party computer networks to further camouflage the true source of the e-mails. In addition, AOL's suit alleged that neither company has honored AOL member requests to be taken off their mailing lists.

"Squeaky Clean Marketing is anything but squeaky clean," said Vradenburg. "This company and its affiliate, Cyber Services, refuses to operate in a truthful and honest way. They hawk apparently useless products and pyramid schemes which seem to be designed to dupe unsuspecting recipients of their junk e-mails. They refuse to respect the privacy of our members and they trample on our e-mail system as if they are entitled to use AOL e-mail resources to operate their business. We will pursue this suit as vigorously as we pursued our case against Over the Air Equipment and we feel confident that we will enjoy a similar outcome."