Indictment On Two Ohio Men For Selling Porn DVDs

A federal jury has impeached two men from Ohio for running a website that distributes obscene DVDs via the U.S mail service, said prosecutors, as reported by TheRegister on July 2, 2007. Alice S. Fisher, Criminal Division's Asstt Attorney Gen. and Brett Tolman U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah declared the case of indictment on the Cleveland pair who engaged in business of distributing such vulgarity and related crime.

The indictment on Sami R. Harb and Michael Harb comes short of a month after the federal jury labeled botnet activities a grim event in cyber security. The two men conducted business via their website MoviesByMail.

According to court documents, an order was placed for the DVDs that contained three films namely "MaxHardcore, Pure Max 18", "Extreme Associates, Cocktails 5" and "MaxHardcore Extreme 12" on Harbs' website and then sent to a Salt Lake City address as a step under the FBI investigation process.

The indictment classifies the films as obscene. According to court proceedings, MoviesByMail dispatched 683 packages to a number of mailing addresses in the Utah State during 2006 out of which 149 were addresses of Salt Lake City.

Considering that the malware menace was growing in magnitude and that the Feds could not handle it alone, Shawn Henry, deputy assistant director in FBI's cyber division summoned the co-operation among government agencies and industry players to combat the problem, as reported by TheRegister on July 2, 2007.

The FBI investigators took up the MoviesByMail case in August 2006 and has since been working on it after the bureau's National Adult Obscenity Initiative Task Force discovered that the site traded porn.

Also, special agents bought and watched six porn videos, physically surveyed the MoviesByMail Cleveland premises, and reviewed state and federal records about the incorporation of the company and the total quantity of packages it has been sending via the U.S. Postal Service.

If proved guilty, there would be five-years jail term for the defendants. The defendants have been asked to appear for a hearing on July 12 before the U.S. Magistrate Judge Brook Wells in Salt Lake City.

Related article: Intego Alerts Users To Beware of a PokerGame Trojan

» SPAMfighter News - 7/13/2007