Wayne Mansfield

Who is Wayne Mansfield?

Wayne Mansfield, of Perth, Australia, was the head of direct marketing business T3 Direct Marketing, operating under a series of two-dollar companies, and in 2005 became the first Australian to be prosecuted for email spamming.

Mansfield was a junk faxer in the mid-1990s before turning to spamming, in which he promoted seminar-hosting companies he ran, including The Maverick Partnership and Business Seminars Australia. These messages admitted he had harvested emails from "various publicly available sources and other marketing promotions", but included instructions for recipients to unsubscribe from the list.

T3 Direct was blacklisted along with the company in June 2002 by the Spam Prevention Early Warning System, along with its ISP, Swiftel. Swiftel suspended T3 Direct's online access for this, and also violation of its terms of service. T3 Direct was left with A$4,578 in charges outstanding to Swiftel. However, Mansfield insisted that it was the other arm of his business, concerned with web design and the management of opt-in databases, which suffered as a result.

In July of the same year, Mansfield began legal action against Perth technician and anti-spam campaigner Joey McNicol'. After receiving spam from Mansfield and discovering that the unsubscribe option did not work, and that contact details in the messages were fake, McNicol had set up a website publishing the details of T3 Direct and other Mansfield companies, as well as publishing these details in newsgroups. Mansfield accused McNicol of sending his company's IP address to SPEWS, prompting the blacklisting, but lost the case as he was unable to prove McNicol had actually contacted SPEWS, and in any case the action was not ruled to be illegal. Although Mansfield's company was ordered to pay McNicol's costs in the action, Mansfield shut down that company without paying those costs and continued business using a new company. McNicol's legal fees were in part paid by donations.