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17th October 2007, 06:38 AM
Jeffrey Kilbride and James Schaffer, were convicted in June by a federal jury in Phoenix on eight counts that included violations of the CAN-SPAM Act, which bans the use of falsified email headers and the spoofing of domain names. Their case was the first to include CAN-SPAM charges.
On Friday, US District Judge David Campbell sentenced Kilbride to 72 months in federal prison, and Schaffer to 63 months.
According to prosecutors, the two men, along with three co-conspirators, sent millions of unsolicited messages advertising hard-core pornographic websites that included pornographic images visible to anyone who simply opened the message. In late 2003, after the CAN-SPAM Act was passed, Kilbride and Schaffer tried to mask their US-based operation by routing traffic through Dutch servers and spoofing the domain posing in the 'From:' field of outbound messages.
In just over a year, the two made more than $1 million in commissions from the websites they hawked.
Campbell also fined the pair $100,000 each, ordered them to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL and required them to forfeit the $1.1 million in ill-gotten gains.
The three others involved in the spam ring included Jennifer Clason, Andrew Ellifson, and Kirk Rogers. All pleaded guilty earlier and testified against Kilbride and Schaffer.
Clason gained some notoriety after her guilty plea when researchers discovered in March 2006 that she was running a website aimed at work-at-home mothers. Although the site, MommyJobs.com, had no direct links to pornography, it did advertise get-rich-quick schemes, another staple of spammers.
http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=10355
On Friday, US District Judge David Campbell sentenced Kilbride to 72 months in federal prison, and Schaffer to 63 months.
According to prosecutors, the two men, along with three co-conspirators, sent millions of unsolicited messages advertising hard-core pornographic websites that included pornographic images visible to anyone who simply opened the message. In late 2003, after the CAN-SPAM Act was passed, Kilbride and Schaffer tried to mask their US-based operation by routing traffic through Dutch servers and spoofing the domain posing in the 'From:' field of outbound messages.
In just over a year, the two made more than $1 million in commissions from the websites they hawked.
Campbell also fined the pair $100,000 each, ordered them to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL and required them to forfeit the $1.1 million in ill-gotten gains.
The three others involved in the spam ring included Jennifer Clason, Andrew Ellifson, and Kirk Rogers. All pleaded guilty earlier and testified against Kilbride and Schaffer.
Clason gained some notoriety after her guilty plea when researchers discovered in March 2006 that she was running a website aimed at work-at-home mothers. Although the site, MommyJobs.com, had no direct links to pornography, it did advertise get-rich-quick schemes, another staple of spammers.
http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=10355