Yahoo filed a lawsuit against an unknown group of spammers on May 16. According to the company, the individuals have used its trademark for a phishing scam. The lawsuit was filed under federal trademark law, federal anti-spam law, as well as other related state laws.

A phising scam consists of sending spam messages that can be thought to come from a well-known company, and then misleading the receivers to disclose personal financial information such as credit card pin numbers or other sort of passwords.

The spammers that have used Yahoo’s good reputation to accomplish this were announcing people that they have won a Yahoo lottery. The prizes that were supposed to have been won amounted from a few thousand dollars to $1 million. The receivers were than encouraged to send personal information to an e-mail address or by clicking on a link in order to get their prize. Sometimes, they were told to contact a third party who would arrange for them to get the prize in exchange for a few hundred dollars.

According to the Guardian, a Yahoo official stated that "Yahoo does not offer any such awards and has no affiliation or any connection with the spammers or their email communications."

Even though the people responsible for this have not been identified, Yahoo hopes that by tracking their e-mail addresses their identities will eventually be disclosed.

The lawsuit comes just a few days after a judge ruled that Stanford Wallace, also known as ‘Spam King,’ and his partners will have to give MySpace $230 million, the largest sum ever to be paid in an anti-spam lawsuit.