Ameritrade spam lawsuit - $2m for lawyers, little for claimants | Hacker News Reader

Ameritrade spam lawsuit - $2m for lawyers, little for claimants

5 pointsDocSavage8 comments

Ameritrade had a breach of its accounts where a spammer got at least e-mail addresses from customers. I first noticed this a few years ago when I got stock spam through unique e-mail addresses assigned to my investment account. After I blogged about it, a few dozen people verified the problem and lawyers started asking me to become a class representative.

I passed, but noticed a proposed settlement the other day: http://www.stockspamsettlement.com/notice.html

The class members get free security software for one year. Ameritrade makes donations totaling $55,000 to anti-spam organizations. The two class representatives get $1,000 each, if approved by the court.

The lawyers are requesting about $1.9 million and Ameritrade will not oppose the request, so nearly all of the damages will pay for attorneys' fees. Not surprising.

Our legal system in action :/

$1.9M is a sucky amount of overhead, but it doesn't seem like the class should be entitled to much more than it got. If there's no evidence that anything except email addresses were stolen, and the breach was accidental, then I don't see much in the way of damages or culpability here. My email address has probably been harvested 100 times over. CRM114 takes care of it. And getting a $20,000 donation to Project Honeypot is pretty sweet (pun intended).

I don't disagree with the class member award, but if this is the expected outcome, why go forward with the case at all unless it's just a way to fund your legal practice? That's what bothers me.

Playing devil's advocate: perhaps it seems wasteful in isolation, but if it were not for running the risk of owing many times the actual damages worth of attorneys' fees, companies would be able to screw large groups of people for small sums with impunity.

I just got a letter about this the other day. I threw it away assuming I would get nothing.

There should be a limit for lawyers to get 33% of a class action. Lets see $600k for claimants, 600k for anti-spam organizations, and then 600k for the lawyers.

Class action lawsuits are the legal equivalent of software patents, if you ask me. They're just a nuisance and have little benefit to the consumer or society in general.

1.9 million doesn't sound like too much for several years of work by multiple lawyers.

Several years of lawyer work for this kind of award? It sounds too much for me. That's like 1.9 million for building a web form.

I've been noticing recently that law and computer science have a great deal in common. For instance, to accomplish a 'small' or 'trivial' task in either field is often not as easy as an outsider might assume.

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