Is This False Advertising?

Factual Questions
1

I got a piece of spam today. Most of it was very ordinary, telling me about hot college students who are having wild crazy monkey sex on their webcam in order to raise money and stay in school.

Now, I read mail with a text-only reader (Pine), so whenever anyone sends me a Java Script, I get their code instead of whatever they wanted me to have. With that in mind, check this out:

               Madeline,Natalie, and Vida's Sorority Cam



                             WEB CAM STATUS: ONLINE

       PEOPLE VIEWING: var num = 0; num=Math.floor(90*Math.random()+150);
                              document.write(num);

:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:

For those of you who don’t speak Javascript, that piece of code would, if run, generate a random number between 150 and 240, then display:

PEOPLE VIEWING: <the random number>

So, the “people viewing” part is a complete lie, as is the bit that purports to tell whether or not the webcam is up, since there’s no code attached to that piece of the spam at all.

Is this false advertising, under the legal sense of the term? Where does advertising law stand with regard to e-mail? Can I make a summer project out of harassing these people?

2

I think you can only sue for false advertizing if you buy the service and the false claim makes the service less valuable to you than it would have been if the claim was true. You also have to beleive the claims were true when you paid. IANAL, this is just what I seem to remember from a class I took in high school.

3

It’s also a pretty good bet that the “college students,” “sorority,” and ‘needing money to stay in school’ parts are false. The whole thing is show biz.

4

Harass them anyway. :smiley:

5

Probably false advertising as much as “Your modem speed is not optimized! Click here to upgrade…”

Bait & switch is more like it.