The best magazine
The "date lonely wife" email spam-scam, a violator of virtually every provision of the federal CAN-SPAM Act, has been halted by the courts at the request of the Federal Trade Commission. Before being shut down, the operators spammed millions of consumers with graphic sexual descriptions intended to drive traffic to their Web sites to ?date lonely housewives.?
U.S. District Court Judge Amy St.
Eve ordered a temporary halt to the spamming and froze the assets of the outfits involved, pending a hearing on the FTC?s request for a preliminary and permanent injunction for violations of federal law.
According to the FTC, the "date lonely wife" spam email contains misleading headers and deceptive subject lines. It does not contain a link to allow consumers to opt out of receiving future spam, does not contain a valid postal address, and does not contain the disclosure, required by law, that it is sexually explicit. Along with those violations of the CAN-SPAM Act, the email also includes sexual materials in the initially viewable area of the e-mail, in violation of the FTC?s Adult Labeling Rule. The FTC has asked the court to permanently bar the illegal spam and to order the operation to give up its ill-gotten gains.
Named in the FTC complaint are Cleverlink Trading Limited, Real World Media, LLC and their principles, Brian D. Muir, Jesse Goldberg, and Caleb Wolf Wickman. The defendants are based in California.
In papers filed with the court, the FTC alleged that the operators control more than 180 Web sites that claim to be registered to people around the world. The defendants used an offshore payment processor on the island of St. Kitts in the Caribbean, have foreign bank accounts to collect spam proceeds, and used a Cyprus-based company name and address to front the operation. According to the FTC, they routed their spam messages through other people?s computers, falsify contacted e-mail addresses, and obscured tools that would allow a recipient to stop or complain about the spam. The FTC alleges that the operation is actually U.S.-based and that the defendants are trying to conceal their identities from U.S. law enforcers.
The FTC complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, in Chicago.
The FTC also acknowledged the "valuable assistance" of the Microsoft Corporation in pursuing the case.
Source: Federal Trade Commission
Source: ...