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 (SPEWS), along with its ISP, Swiftel (now People Telecom).
[3][4] The case was brought by the Department of Internal Affairs (New Zealand) after it had received 53 complaints relating to unsolicited email from Mansfield and his entities between April and September 2010.
[7] In April 2009, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) disqualified Mansfield from managing corporations for four years following their investigation into his role in two failed companies.