"They Find Mass E-Mailers And Play Tricks on Them"
Mylene Mangalindan amuses in the Wall Street Journal with Web Vigilantes Give Spammers Big Dose of Their Own Medicine:

When all 24 office phones at Scott Richter's e-mail marketing company started ringing at once, with nobody at the other end of the line, employees knew they were under attack again.

Daniel Dye, the systems administrator, could do little. After 15 minutes into the lunchtime assault last month, Mr. Dye recalls yelling, "Go ahead and pull your phones out of the walls for now. It'll be easier to think about what to do." Examining the phone system's central computer, Mr. Dye found that someone had hacked into it and programmed a feature that caused all the phones to ring at the same time.

Mr. Richter's company had been "flamed" -- attacked by a shadowy group of vigilantes who have taken to harassing spammers using just about any means they can dream up.

I'm deeply saddened.

They form a loose affiliation that uses the Internet to coordinate attacks from around the world. E-mail marketers often feel powerless against them. "It's an underground cult running it," says Mr. Richter, whose Westminster, Colo., e-mail marketing business, Optinrealbig.com (www.optinbig.com), pitches mortgages, adult-related products and Viagra. "You don't know who they are."

Kinda like spammers, eh, Pond Scum?

Much more by following the link, but here's one more excerpt:

Mr. Tsilionis denies that he is a spammer. He runs Perfect Telecom, a telecom and Web-hosting company whose clients include bulk e-mailers. When he was attacked, he called his Greek data center in Athens. He got confirmation that all 184 server computers had stopped working, overwhelmed by roughly 15 million e-mail messages that had arrived all at once. Meanwhile, 30,000 complaints had been filed against Mr. Tsilionis's company with the telecommunications companies that provide his Internet access, leading them to cut off Mr. Tsilionis's access.

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