The Two Largest Recent Settlements
Verkada Inc. paid $2.95 million in 2024 to settle FTC and DOJ CAN-SPAM Act claims, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, the largest such penalty on record. The case covered more than 30 million commercial emails sent across a three-year period, with violations including no functioning opt-out mechanism, unsubscribe requests that went unhonored, and no physical postal address included in the emails.
Experian Consumer Services, doing business as ConsumerInfo.com, settled a similar FTC and DOJ action in 2023 for $650,000. The underlying conduct was sending marketing emails disguised as account or transactional notices to consumers who had signed up specifically to manage their own credit report, without a clear opt-out mechanism, and the settlement required Experian to build an Email Preference Center into every marketing communication it sends going forward.
The Agency’s Own Exposure When Sending on a Client’s Behalf
Both settlements above targeted the business whose products were being marketed, not an outside email platform or agency partner. That reflects a rule this site’s own CAN-SPAM guide already covers: liability under the Act cannot be outsourced to an ESP, a cold-email tool, or an agency partner, regardless of who operates the sending infrastructure. An agency running a client’s cold email campaign is running exactly this exposure, on the client’s behalf, whenever it is acting as the sender of record.
The FTC’s total enforcement record is commonly cited at roughly 169 CAN-SPAM cases since the law took effect in 1999, an average of roughly 6 to 7 cases a year across more than two decades. This research could not trace that specific count to a single directly loaded FTC page, given the FTC’s own site returned a bot-protection block on every attempted fetch this session, so treat it as a widely repeated figure worth confirming directly rather than a page-verified statistic.
The Numbers
Verkada Inc. paid $2.95 million in 2024 to settle FTC and DOJ CAN-SPAM Act claims, the largest such penalty on record, over more than 30 million commercial emails sent across a three-year period.
CyberInsider, “FTC Settles with Verkada on $2.95 Million for CAN-SPAM Act Violations”
Verkada’s violations included no functioning opt-out mechanism, unsubscribe requests that went unhonored, and no physical postal address included in the emails.
CyberInsider, “FTC Settles with Verkada on $2.95 Million for CAN-SPAM Act Violations”
Experian Consumer Services (ConsumerInfo.com) paid $650,000 in 2023 to settle a similar FTC and DOJ action, for sending marketing emails disguised as account or transactional notices to consumers managing their credit report, without a clear opt-out mechanism.
Perkins Coie, “FTC Reaches $650,000 Settlement With Experian Over Unsolicited Emails”
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- CyberInsider, “FTC Settles with Verkada on $2.95 Million for CAN-SPAM Act Violations”
- Perkins Coie, “FTC Reaches $650,000 Settlement With Experian Over Unsolicited Emails”