A petition on change.org pulled in about 100k signatures in 12 hours, each signature sending a notification to Verizon's customer service department. It was authored by a woman named Molly, who also beat up Bank of America with a popular petition a few months ago. Massing consumer outrage like this seems to have at least some impact.

Obfuscation is also done to protect the identity of the "deputy" members of the SpamCop team. They're the people that do part-time work digging through and documenting the spam they get. If their addresses are revealed to spammers, their ability to be effective is diminished. Once found out, spammers would just avoid their addresses to avoid being reported.

And these are smart people that know the difference between commercial email (that you agreed to get or asked for) and SPAM.