Lycos Europe, a separate company than Lycos (United States), stated that all allegations of its "Make Love Not Spam" campaign site being defaced by hackers are incorrect.

The company launched the aforementioned campaign to slow down spammers by letting users download screensavers, that occupy idle CPU cycles, to attain bandwidth from blacklisted spam servers. Lycos Europe said their goal is to make sending spam more expensive for spammers.

All allegations of its site being defaced were "hoax", said Malte Pollmann, Director, Communications Services, Lycos Europe. "We have obviously reached our goal and are getting to the spammers. On our servers, we don't have any logs of an attack. No one was able to verify that."

Despite the company’s response, "Make Love Not Spam" site was inaccessible for some time on Tuesday and majority of Wednesday.

Lycos Europe claims that spammers sent an image copy of the site to Finnish anti-virus company, F-Secure. The e-mail said, "Yes, attacking spammers is wrong. You know this, you shouldn't be doing it. Your IP address and request have been logged and will be reported to your ISP for further action."

Lycos Europe manages 40 million e-mail accounts of users in various parts of Europe. Pollmann said that spammers, who were obviously against the company’s stance to slow down spam, most likely started the rumor.

There are also claims that the screensaver launches DDoS attacks against known spam servers to reduce bandwidth, but the company stated that it is not the case. "We slow the remaining bandwidth to 5 percent. It wouldn't be in our interests to (carry out DDoS attacks). It is to increase the cost of spamming. We have an interest to make this, economically, not more attractive."

F-Secure believes that users should stay away from the screensaver, as it might contain legal problems.