Two men have been sentenced to more than five years in prison for organizing and running an international pornographic spamming business that grossed over $1 million.
Jeffrey A. Kilbride, 41, of Venice, Calif., and James R. Schaffer, 41, of Paradise Valley, Ariz., were sentenced by U.S. District Judge David G. Campbell of the District of Arizona in a hearing that began on Sept. 24, 2007, and concluded yesterday. Kilbride was sentenced to 72 months in prison and Schaffer was sentenced to 63 months in prison.
Beginning in 2003, Kilbride and Schaffer established a spamming operation in the United States. Their business model consisted of sending millions of unsolicited email messages which advertised commercial Internet hard-core pornography Web sites.
Kilbride and Schaffer earned a commission for each person they caused to subscribe to one of these Web sites. Hard-core pornographic images were embedded in each email they sent and were visible to any person who opened the email.
In all, AOL and the FTC received over 1.5 million complaints from spam recipients. The evidence at trial established that the defendants falsified header information and domain names of the messages they sent by creating a fictitious employee at a shell corporation in the Republic of Mauritius, in order to hide their criminal conduct.
Originally posted on October 13, 2007 @ 1:15 pm
Too bad government agencies can’t put people in jail for spamming on a more aggressive pace. It only took authorities 5 years to shut these guys down… Also the xxx sites that paid them (and probably knew about the activities based on their log files) should face heavy fines as well as they didn’t shut down their accounts over those years.
In the cases where there is clear spam activity the website owners themselves should also go to jail for allowing people to spam their paid referral urls as well – Stop the money flow, stop the spammers and those who profit from it.
Indeed, the government needs to look at the big picture of pornographic spamming instead of shutting down 2 spamming businesses every 5 years.
While this decision will definitely raise fear among many spammers, it is not enough to make them quit their lucrative business.