The Make Money Fast Hall of Humiliation

AOL has always made it extremely easy for people of less than technical backgrounds to make the leap into the online world. Of course, that has meant, for us, that the online world is filled with a particularly noisome lot with the @aol.com tagged at the end of their email address.

Now, however, AOL appears to be taking a step in the right direction: They're filing suits against those that would prey on their crop of newbies, and they're the first to do so under Virginia's new anti-Phishing statute. Here's a clip from the report in the Finanzen.net magazine:

The lawsuits are the first by a major ISP to cite Virginia's first-in-the-nation anti-phishing statute, adopted in July 2005. The lawsuits also cite applicable Federal laws, including the Federal Lanham Act (trademark law), and the Federal Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (antispam). AOL is seeking total damage awards of $18 million.

AOL's lawsuits allege that these phishing gangs - some believed to operate from abroad - victimized AOL and CompuServe members through emails that attempted to trick and lure them to fake Websites of legitimate online companies, for the purpose of fooling them into giving up their personal identifying information, such as AOL screennames, passwords, and credit card information.

(Note: Since the article is on a non-english site, I don't think they noticed that their copy/paste job has apparently broken the formatting. It's a difficult read)