I just *had* to make that bad joke. I am not sorry. So, a tiny, tiny fraction of a portion of the pr0n spam email we get at Fleshbot might see a decline as two dudes have been convicted of porn spamming — they were so stupid as to embed explicit images into the email they spammed out, while falsifying headers and (gasp!) using false info to register domains. They are facing some serious prison time, but mostly for money laundering. I wish I could find out who they were spamming for, just because I’d like to expose (and ridicule) porn companies who think spamming is a marketing tool. Snip:
A jury in the US District Court for the District of Arizona convicted Jeffrey Kilbride and James Schaffer on eight criminal counts.
The trial was the first to include charges under the anti-spam laws passed by the US Congress in 2003 in an effort to crack down on unsolicited commercial email.
The men made “millions of dollars by sending unwanted sexually explicit emails to hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including families and children”, Alice Fisher, assistant attorney general at the US Department of Justice, said.
Kilbride and Schaffer started their spamming operation in 2003, and the two made more than $2m by sending out spam emails advertising pornographic websites, the Department of Justice said. The two earned a commission for each person directed to one of the websites.
Hard-core pornographic images were embedded in each email, and were visible to anyone who opened the email, the department said.
Kilbride and Schaffer were convicted of two violations of the Controlling the Assault of Non-solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act. One violation occurred when Kilbride and Schaffer sent multiple electronic commercial mail messages containing falsified header information. The pair also broke the law by sending email using domain names that were registered using false information.
Link.