RSSTwo Spammers Face Over Five Years
By Ed Oswald | Published October 17, 2007, 3:31 PM
Two men behind a spam ring that sent millions of pornographic mails are the first to be convicted under new federal spam laws, the Justice Department said.
The law, known as CAN-SPAM, was passed in 2003 in order to criminalize the sending of unsolicited mail. Since then, many companies including AOL and Microsoft have used the law to fight back against spammers.
According to government prosecutors, Jeffrey Kilbride of Venice, Calif., and James Schaffer of Paradise Valley, Ariz. purchased lists of e-mail addresses and then sent spam e-mails to those accounts advertising pornographic sites.
During a nine month period in 2004, Kilbride and Schaffer apparently sent some 600,000 e-mails with the links. For each person that ending up visiting the site, both men were paid a small commission.
The two were apparently sending messages even before the CAN-SPAM act was passed, although attempted to skirt prosecution by claiming the mails came from Amsterdam, Netherlands in the messages themselves.
"At Kilbride and Schaffer's trial, eight citizens traveled from Massachusetts, Texas, Iowa, California and Arizona to testify about the context in which their families, including some children, received the pornographic spam messages," the Justice Department said in a statement. "In all, AOL and the FTC received over 1.5 million complaints from spam recipients, including some who had set parental controls to protect their children from accessing graphic sexual content."
The original convictions were handed down in June and included conspiracy, money laundering, fraud, and transportation of obscene materials. Last week, a Arizona federal judge sentenced both to more than five years in federal prison.
Lawyers for the defendants have declined to comment.
Zzzzzzzzzzzz.......
Old news. This story has been all over other news sites all week. What took so long?
The domain name betahistory.com is still available.
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About time. They can nail everybody for music and crap. But it seems they only catch a few of these bums every once in awhile.
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Only 5 years? Should have been more severe.
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hmmm?
shouldn't they be processed into spam? it is made with pig by products.
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I hope these fat jagoffs get sodomized every day in jail, I have noticed ever since my hosting company put thier own filters in place, plus the ones built into Windows Mail and Outlook, I dont get one single crap email, even the one that used to go straight to junk mail.
Now I dont even get those, it's beautiful. For me, the days of getting 2000 emails a week are over.
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Negative score in 3...2...
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I'm a slightly overweight 'f**got'.
Wrong choice of description for spammers, methinks.
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...-1
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Teehee.
I'll remember that.
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Why would you call them cigarettes? :)
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your an overwight ciggret ?
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They are now jagoffs, you were right. I apologize.
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