Us Porn Spammers Detained

As per the news by The Register on June 26, 2007, two men running a spam-operation for promoting obscene sites were caught on June 26, 2007. Arizona, a federal-jury in Phoenix detained Jaffrey Kilbride, 41, Venice in California and James Schaffer, also 41, from Paradise Valley in Arizona. They were accused of fraud, conspiracy, transportation of pornographic materials, and money laundering.

From 2003, Schaffer and Kilbride has started developing a scamming operation, promoting obscene sites and it earned them almost $2m as commission from the operators of porn site for the web traffic generated by mails.

According to the news reported by Azstarnet on June 26, 2007, the authorities reported that pornographic data was fixed with each email and it can be viewed as soon as the email is opened. They also added that the spammers take the name of Republic of Mauritius and the Isle of Man to be safe and to avoid coming in the suspicion of the judiciary.

According to the news by Azstarnet on June 26, 2007, US Attorney Dan Knauss and Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher said that the spammers had set up their business during 2004 but the trial of those spammers was the 1st to include the charges under 2003 Act which accused them of sending uninvited porn and promoting materials.

Shockingly, even CAN-SPAM Act that prohibits the spreading of commercial emails containing fallacious header information was not able to stop Kilbride and Schaffer from sending obscene mails.

As soon as the implementation of the law on 1st January 2004, they just simply logged in the servers of Amsterdam to masquerade their emails as coming from outside of the US. Moreover, the 'from' names & email addresses are not similar to 'reply to' addresses, which in turn make the recipient confuse about the sender of the email.

As per the news by The Register on June 26, 2007, the US Department of Justice said that domain names that send those spam had fake employees' name in their registration. The employees apparently worked with ShellCorporation Kilbride, & Schaffer in Mauritius. Thus, it violates another rule of CAN-SPAM Act.

The witnesses include 3 US citizens who admit their guilt of conspiring with Kilbride & Schaffer as well as 8 citizens who had registered complaint either with the AOL Inc. or with the Fed Trade Commission.

Kilbride & Schaffer are imposed a penalty for 5 years in detention for each of the spam act, plus up to US$ 500,000 fine, and at the most imprisonment for 20 years for money-laundering. Their sentence was set for September 24.

Related article: US Passes Baton to Asia in Spam Relay

» SPAMfighter News - 7/12/2007