DECLARATION OF JAMES S. GORDON, JR. IN RESPONSE 

AND OPPOSITION TO MOTION FOR ATTORNEY FEES 

GORDON v. VIRTUMUNDO GROUP, INC. - 1

I.JUSTICE LAW, PC 

1325 Fourth Ave., Suite 940 

Seattle, WA 98101 

Phone: 206-304-5400 

Fax: 206-624-0717 

 

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i.Justice Law, PC THE HON. JOHN C. COUGHENOUR 

Robert J. Siegel 

1325 Fourth Ave., Suite 940 

Seattle, WA 98101 

(206) 624-9392 

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT 

WESTERN DISTRICT OF WASHINGTON, SEATTLE

JAMES S. GORDON, Jr., a married 

individual, , Omni Innovations, LLC 

Plaintiff, 

 v. 

VIRTUMUNDO, INC, a Delaware 

corporation, d/b/a 

ADNOWLEDGEMAIL.COM; 

ADKNOWLEDGE, INC., a Delaware 

corporation, d/b/a 

ADKNOWLEDGEMAIL.COM; 

SCOTT LYNN, an individual; and 

JOHN DOES, I-X, 

Defendants. 

NO. CV06-0204JCC 

DECLARATION OF JAMES S. 

GORDON, JR. IN RESPONSE AND 

OPPOSITION TO MOTION FOR 

ATTORNEY FEES 

James S. Gordon, Jr. declares as follows: 

1. I, James S. Gordon, Jr., am the Plaintiff in the above captioned lawsuit. I am over the age 

of 18, of sound mind, and am otherwise competent to testify. 

2. I am owner of the domain name Gordonworks.com, which I registered on or about May 

1998. 

Case 2:06-cv-00204-JCC Document 136 Filed 07/02/2007 Page 1 of 8

Gordon v. Virtumundo Inc et al Doc. 136

Dockets.Justia.com
DECLARATION OF JAMES S. GORDON, JR. IN RESPONSE 

AND OPPOSITION TO MOTION FOR ATTORNEY FEES 

GORDON v. VIRTUMUNDO GROUP, INC. - 2

I.JUSTICE LAW, PC 

1325 Fourth Ave., Suite 940 

Seattle, WA 98101 

Phone: 206-304-5400 

Fax: 206-624-0717 

 

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3. I have been plagued by spam for well over eight years. Over time, my spam problem has 

grown more and more severe, and has now spiraled out of control, consuming more and 

more of my time and resources. From late 1998 to late 2003, I fought spam by deleting, 

complaining, reporting, and filtering spam. My first lawsuit against a spammer was filed 

a full five years after the inception of this persistent spam problem, i.e. December 2003. 

And to this point all my efforts to curtail the onslaught of spam have all failed. I have 

been substantially adversely impacted by the continued onslaught of spam. Exhibit “A“

is a true and correct copy of a letter to my congressman concerning my first major battle 

with a spammer in 1999. 

4. Despite numerous requests and demands to cease and desist, Defendants continue to send 

unlawful spam to me! Defendants have continued to send spam to me at least up until 

June 26, 2007, and throughout the pendency of this litigation. (See copy of a recent spam 

from Defendant Virtumundo, attached hereto as Exhibit “B”.)

5. Beginning on or about February 15, 2004, I configured the email server hosting my 

‘gordonworks.com’ domain to provide an automated response a/k/a “Auto-responder” to 

any and all commercial electronic mail. Copies of the automated response messages are 

attached hereto as Exhibit “C“. By this means, I have personally, on behalf of 

‘gordonworks.com’, sent approximately 1,054 direct email requests to defendant and/or 

defendant’s agents to stop the transmission of all email to me.Additionally, I have sent or 

caused to be sent on my behalf close to one million auto-responder cease and desist 

messages to spammers during the period of February 2004 to May 2006, many of which 

Case 2:06-cv-00204-JCC Document 136 Filed 07/02/2007 Page 2 of 8
DECLARATION OF JAMES S. GORDON, JR. IN RESPONSE 

AND OPPOSITION TO MOTION FOR ATTORNEY FEES 

GORDON v. VIRTUMUNDO GROUP, INC. - 3

I.JUSTICE LAW, PC 

1325 Fourth Ave., Suite 940 

Seattle, WA 98101 

Phone: 206-304-5400 

Fax: 206-624-0717 

 

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bounced back indicating non-functioning return addresses. Exhibit “D” is a true and 

correct copy of one of defendant’s bounced messages.

6. I have made the following efforts to stop spam generally, including spam received from 

Defendants, and have suffered the following adverse impacts and damages as a result of the 

spam received from Defendants and others. 

6.1 In January and February 2005, I purchased a new business computer along with a 

second business computer to help with the increased load of spam. In May 2005, my 

monthly service fee increased from approximately $40/month to about $65/month. In 

November 2006, this fee increased to about $180/month – in Feb 2007 to 

$220/month. All to handle the increased burden of managing spam. 

6.2 I was forced to add “staff” by way of engaging the Assisted Server Support team 

at Godaddy for a monthly fee of $99. The alternative is to pay $75/hour for 

independent IT services. 

6.3 It has been necessary to purchase numerous forensic tools, anti-virus tools, antispyware tools, and spam filtering tools over the last four years. I have spent 

approximately $2000.00 on these tools and services. 

6.4 The large volume of spam received caused a displacement of over 25 Gigabytes 

of hard disk storage space on two computers. 

6.5 I lost the use of my laptop as its hard drive was “overrun” with spam necessitating 

the purchases of the two computers in 6.1, above. 

6.6 On a personal level, time dealing with spam is time away from my family. 

Case 2:06-cv-00204-JCC Document 136 Filed 07/02/2007 Page 3 of 8
DECLARATION OF JAMES S. GORDON, JR. IN RESPONSE 

AND OPPOSITION TO MOTION FOR ATTORNEY FEES 

GORDON v. VIRTUMUNDO GROUP, INC. - 4

I.JUSTICE LAW, PC 

1325 Fourth Ave., Suite 940 

Seattle, WA 98101 

Phone: 206-304-5400 

Fax: 206-624-0717 

 

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6.7 My wife, three adult children, and two friends were sued by a spammer to 

retaliate against me. 

6.8 I have suffered a significant loss of time spent on more productive pursuits, such 

as my Ph.D. program which was initially a three year program. After years of 

dealing with the spam problem, I will finish in a little more than five years. 

Product development efforts in my business have also been hampered, and slowed 

significantly. 

6.9 I have suffered a loss of control of my intellectual/personal property, (domains) to 

spammers, and a loss of privacy and loss of peace of mind to enjoy my domain 

and the unfettered use of the internet. 

6.10 I have been “joe-jobbed” by spammers whereby spammers subvert my 

domains by “stealing” my identity, which makes it appear that my domains are 

sending spam. As a result of this subterfuge, my domains are being blocked from 

sending legitimate email communications (non-commercial). 

6.11 I have been subjected to dictionary attacks wherein a spammer uses 

automated means to guess at possible names and sends spam to these newly 

created names at gordonworks.com, thereby again increasing the volume of spam 

received and resulting consequences. 

6.12 Spammers have sold my personal profile for profit to other spammers. 

Apparently, the buying and selling of personal profiles is a prime means of 

remuneration for online marketers. Each email address one owns must be delisted from the hundreds or thousands of “host names” owned and controlled by 

Case 2:06-cv-00204-JCC Document 136 Filed 07/02/2007 Page 4 of 8
DECLARATION OF JAMES S. GORDON, JR. IN RESPONSE 

AND OPPOSITION TO MOTION FOR ATTORNEY FEES 

GORDON v. VIRTUMUNDO GROUP, INC. - 5

I.JUSTICE LAW, PC 

1325 Fourth Ave., Suite 940 

Seattle, WA 98101 

Phone: 206-304-5400 

Fax: 206-624-0717 

 

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each spammer. And once this is accomplished, spammers and their affiliates 

create new host names to spam from – making successful de-listing virtually 

impossible. Global de-listing is not available from the majority of spammers and 

from spammer domains not yet created. 

6.13 I receive 20-100 viruses/malware emails each week. This number has 

been as high as 500-600 per week. This has resulted in four server crashes that 

necessitated the purchases of new hard drives or computers since January 2005. 

These crashes resulted from malware infections of my computers. These 

infections have also caused the loss of business data including tax and banking 

files. 

6.14 I have also been forced to expend considerable time and labor dealing with 

client spam problems presented to me by my customers, including malware 

removal, recovered/replaced hard drives, installed virus and adware programs, 

etc. 

6.15 I have been forced to change Internet Service Providers four times since 

2000 as none were able to help me to effectively curb the spam. 

6.16 I have sent approximately 14,000 separate and distinct complaints to my 

ISPs, spammers’ network service providers, Richland and Kennewick Police 

Depts., Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, 

Washington State Attorney General’s Office, and four state and federal 

legislators. 

Case 2:06-cv-00204-JCC Document 136 Filed 07/02/2007 Page 5 of 8
DECLARATION OF JAMES S. GORDON, JR. IN RESPONSE 

AND OPPOSITION TO MOTION FOR ATTORNEY FEES 

GORDON v. VIRTUMUNDO GROUP, INC. - 6

I.JUSTICE LAW, PC 

1325 Fourth Ave., Suite 940 

Seattle, WA 98101 

Phone: 206-304-5400 

Fax: 206-624-0717 

 

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6.17 I have spent time and labor writing, locating, and mailing dozens of 

certified cease and desist letters to spammers. 

6.18 I have used the automated un-subscription program, SpamFire with 

SpamCrime Reporter, created by Matterform Media to unsubscribe from over one 

hundred thousand spammers’ offers. This tool uses the methods available in the 

email and web site it points to to automatically opt-out of each email received. 

This includes any email received from defendants during the approximate time 

period of 2004-6. 

6.19 My server has been burdened by spam which features images in the place 

of text - text is easier to filter. Image spam is necessarily 30-50 times larger than 

text messages, which are the norm of email communications, which significantly 

increases the use of bandwidth and usurps hard-drive capacity. 

6.20 The time I am forced to spend is 90-120 minutes per day – 365 days per 

year downloading and filtering spam. 

6.21 I have postponed adding 110 new interested customers to my server, 

because spamming is out-of-control. The fee paid to me would cover the base 

cost of Omni’s server, but the added work due to spam makes this endeavor too 

costly. 

6.22 I have had to increase my bandwidth capacity from less than 10GB/month 

to 500GB/month in the past 2 years. 

Case 2:06-cv-00204-JCC Document 136 Filed 07/02/2007 Page 6 of 8
Case 2:06-cv-00204-JCC Document 136 Filed 07/02/2007 Page 7 of 8
DECLARATION OF JAMES S. GORDON, JR. IN RESPONSE 

AND OPPOSITION TO MOTION FOR ATTORNEY FEES 

GORDON v. VIRTUMUNDO GROUP, INC. - 8

I.JUSTICE LAW, PC 

1325 Fourth Ave., Suite 940 

Seattle, WA 98101 

Phone: 206-304-5400 

Fax: 206-624-0717 

 

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Case 2:06-cv-00204-JCC Document 136 Filed 07/02/2007 Page 8 of 8