Trouble Brewing for Kraft and Gevalia Over Coffee Spam

FOSTER CITY, Calif., April 18 /PRNewswire/ -- A federal lawsuit alleging violations of federal and California anti-spam email laws was filed today in U.S. District Court, Northern District, in San Francisco against Illinois-based Kraft Foods, Inc. (NYSE:KFT) and its New Jersey-based subsidiary Victor Th. Engwall & Co., for using illegal spam to advertise Gevalia coffee.

The complaint demands a jury trial and seeks statutory and liquidated damages that could exceed $11.7 million.

Bay Area Attorney John L. Fallat filed the suit on behalf of client Hypertouch, Inc., a small Internet service provider (ISP) in Foster City, Calif., for flooding the ISP's customers with more than 8500 unsolicited and unwanted email advertisements for Gevalia. "This lawsuit is a strong warning to companies that they will still be held accountable even if they pay someone else to do their spamming," says Fallat.

"Despite ongoing complaints, Gevalia has been using illegal spam since 2001," said Hypertouch president and founder Joe Wagner. "Gevalia routinely uses some of the most notorious spammers in the business." The suit alleges that the defendants and/or their agents send spam email advertisements with fraudulent and misleading headers, often to randomly generated and harvested email addresses. "Gevalia's spam is even specially tailored for different targets," Wagner continued. "In January 2005, Microsoft Hotmail users received Gevalia spam that had hidden text copied from the web pages of ABCNews.com to get around spam filters."

"Gevalia provides a perfect example of the deep flaws federal CAN-SPAM Act," Wagner said. "CAN-SPAM put the onus on the public to do what you should never do -- attempt to 'opt-out' of spam. We submitted a brand new, never used email address to Gevalia's opt-out link as a test. Sure enough, that email address, given only to Gevalia, started getting daily spam for all kinds of products and services."

"If submitting email addresses to Kraft's Gevalia is demonstrably a bad idea, imagine the peril in submitting addresses directly to the spammers they hire," Fallat added. "The aptly named CAN-SPAM Act should be rewritten so that it supports strong anti-spam laws like California's instead of deliberately weakening them."

Anyone who has information about the email marketing and/or business practices of Kraft or Victor Th. Engwall & Co (a.k.a. Gevalia) is invited to contact attorney John Fallat at 415-457-3773 or email him at jfallat@fallat.com. Full details and ongoing updates are available at http://legal.hypertouch.com/ .


Source: John L. Fallat

CONTACT: John Fallat, 415-457-3773