Via Information Week:
Two men convicted of sending pornographic spam under the Can-Spam Act have been sentenced to serve more than five years in prison, the U.S. Department of Justice said Friday.Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the criminal division and interim U.S. Attorney Dan G. Knauss of the District of Arizona said that Jeffrey A. Kilbride, 41, of Venice, Calif., and James R. Schaffer, 41, of Paradise Valley, Ariz., had been sentenced to 72 months and 63 months in prison, respectively, for running an international pornographic spam ring that took in more than $1 million.
Kilbride received a longer sentence because the court found that he had obstructed justice by trying to deter a government witness from testifying in the case, according to the Department of Justice.
Kilbride and Schaffer were fined $100,000, ordered to pay $77,500 to AOL, and will forfeit more than $1.1 million in illegal proceeds from their spam operation.
The Department of Justice claims the trial, which concluded in June, was the first to include obscenity charges under the Can-Spam Act. The Federal Trade Commission announced the first successful criminal prosecution under the Can-Spam Act on April 29, 2004.
Kilbride and Schaffer began spamming in 2003, sending out millions of spam messages advertising hard-core porn sites. The messages contained graphic images that were visible to whoever opened the e-mail. Later in 2003, the two men began using servers in Amsterdam to make messages they were sending from Phoenix appear to be coming from outside the United States.
On June 25, a federal jury in Phoenix convicted the two men of sending spam messages with forged headers and domain names, conspiracy, fraud, money laundering, and obscenity charges.
Woo-hoo! Maybe some day I’ll be able open the e-mail account for this blog without flinching.
–Ann Bartow
