2nd Complaint in 3 Months Alleges Credit Information Firm Is an Email Spammer

Credit information company One Technologies removed to U.S. District Court for Western Washington in Tacoma a complaint filed Oct. 17 in Clark County Superior Court in which Nathan Brinton alleges the firm sent him at least 175 spam emails since August, in violation of Washington consumer protection laws.

One Technologies intends to contest that Brinton has adequately stated a claim, and plans to file a motion to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), said its notice of removal Wednesday (docket 3:23-cv-06046). One Technologies also reserves all rights, and plans to contest that Washington courts have personal jurisdiction over it, said the notice.

Brinton’s complaint is the second pro se plaintiff in the past three months to accuse One Technologies of being a professional email scammer. In September, Joel Fink alleged that One Technologies sent him at least 73 unsolicited, unlawful spam emails (see 2310050001).

One Technologies moved Oct. 11 to dismiss Fink’s complaint for lack of personal jurisdiction in California (see 2310120024). U.S. District Judge Edward Chen for Northern California in San Francisco ordered Fink to show cause by Nov. 9 why his case against One Technologies shouldn’t be dismissed for failure to respond to the motion to dismiss by the Oct. 25 deadline (see 2311060038). Court records show Fink didn’t respond to the show cause order.

Brinton’s complaint alleges he’s entitled to at least $350,000 in statutory damages under California, Washington and Florida consumer protection statutes, exclusive of the treble damages he also seeks. He alleges the One Technologies spam emails he received “misrepresented or obscured information about the point of origin and transmission path” of those emails.

The spam emails Brinton received often used falsified “from” lines, his complaint alleged. In so doing, One Technologies “made it unreasonably difficult or impossible to discover the actual sender” of the spam emails, it added.

One of those emails, for example, used “Brintonnathan” in the “from” line, said his complaint. Brinton didn’t send the email to himself, and it wasn’t from someone with the same name as him, it said. The message was a “commercial solicitation” for One Technologies’ credit information services, it said.

Brinton also alleges in his complaint that One Technologies used third-party domain names without the permission of those third parties. The company did so “both in the header content” of the spam emails and within the body content of the emails themselves, it said. Many of the emails Brinton received used storage.googleapis.com as the “main call to action link,” it said. But it’s a violation of Google’s terms of service to use Google’s application programming interfaces to promote “disruptive” commercial messages or advertisements, it said.