South Florida Personal Injury Blog

A Boca Raton management consulting company and its personal injury lawyer on the West Coast is filing suit against Intuit, a California-based software company. PN, the local company, alleges that it received thousands of spam emails to one particular address after purchasing faulty software from Intuit. Unsubscribe attempts did nothing to stem the flow of the emails, many of which contained extremely misleading subject lines, according to the complaint filed in a California court. The complaint alleges that Intuit committed fraud, breach of contract, and violations of California statutes concerning unsolicited commercial email.

PN’s injury attorney in California has said that the Intuit case is among the worst spamming he has seen. In addition to the misleading subject lines, sheer massive quantity, and failure of Intuit to unsubscribe the company from the unsolicited emails, the emails interfered with daily business functioning. PN says that the spam emails were sent in quantities as large as thousands in a single day. The high volume prevented correct functioning of their computer equipment. Computers would crash during bouts of intense spamming, causing loss of employees’ time, delays in conducting business, and the loss of unsaved work.

This will not be Intuit’s first appearance in a courtroom. Previously, Intuit settled a class action suit related to its distribution of faulty software. One business owner described the horrifying experience as “every computer user's worst nightmare. My company lost its invoicing, sales reports, inventories, day to day working files, pictures, and other files containing financial information. The files lost represent hundreds of hours of work." The users affected received compensation for their losses related to the installation of a $99 software created by Intuit.

The Boca Raton management company suing Intuit for spamming claims it never requested any emails; they were completely unsolicited. Intuit allegedly told the company that it would not receive further emails, but did not follow up.

California law allows statutory damages in the case of unsolicited email of the type that PN says Intuit sent. In accordance with California law, PN has requested damages of $1,000 per email. PN has currently documented nearly 13,000 email received at a single email address during a period of about six weeks in October and November 2008.