FTC bosses dine out on frozen spam ring
The Federal Trade Commission is celebrating an initial victory against a group thought to be responsible for a third of all recent spam. The so-called ‘Herbal King’ group has had its assets frozen and its operations have been shut down pending legal action.
If you’ve had e-mails offering knock-off watches, weight loss pills or penis enlargement pills in the past 20 months, chances are they came from the group. And as annoying as the ads are, it seems there are plenty of customers: FTC records show that the group received $400,000 in Visa card payments in a single month.
The freezing order comes from a federal court in Chicago under the CAN-SPAM Act. That legislation doesn’t ban spam as such, but makes it illegal to send unsolicited messages which contain misleading information or don’t give recipients a way of opting-out of future e-mails. It’s alleged the group falsified the e-mail headers to disguise the original sender.
At least one of the gang has a previous judgement for spamming. New Zealand-born Lance Atkinson, now living in Australia, is already subject to a $2.2 million judgment for spamming from a 1995 investigation. Ironically a man answering the door to reporters at Atkinson’s house claimed he wasn’t the alleged spam producer, but instead an innocent butcher.
The FTC claims the operation spans the globe, with the group taking orders through websites based in China, and the pills shipping from India. As well as getting the freezing order in the US, the FTC is suing the individuals involved, plus four companies they set up, and seeking legal action in the countries of the offenders based overseas.
The group reportedly sent its e-mails via a network of 35,000 computers, many of them belonging to unsuspecting users who’d fallen prey to malware. The network had the capability to send 10 billion messages each day.
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