Five to six years for $1 million porn spammers
Strong sentences for CAN-SPAM breaches, money laundering.
Two US men found guilty in June of breaching the terms of the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act,
as well as numerous other charges including money laundering and witness tampering, have been sentenced to spend over
five years in jail for their crimes. They are the first to be convicted under the US spam control regulations.
The two 41-year-olds, one from California and the other from Arizona, will pay fines of $100,000, as well as a
$77,500 restitution charge to AOL, and must forfeit over $1 million from the profits of their long-running porn
spamming operation. The outfit was behind over half a million spams in the first half of 2004 and drew over 1.5 million
complaints from recipients of their unwanted graphic emails advertising porn sites.
The US Department of Justice (DoJ) estimates the criminal business made 'over $1 million' in profits, and some sources
have put the figure at closer to $2 million. To avoid the clutches of the law after the introduction of the CAN-SPAM act,
the pair routed their mails through servers in the Netherlands, and set up shell companies in Mauritius and the Isle of
Man to hide their finances. The Californian Jeffrey Kilbride received a sentence of 72 months, more than his partner
James Shaffer's 63 months thanks to attempts to silence a witness.
A full statement on the sentencing from the US DoJ can be found
here.
15 October 2007
Tags:
legal, sentence, spam.
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