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Porn Spammers Receive Jail Sentences
Men to serve 63 and 72 month sentences for violation of Federal CAN SPAM Act
October 17, 2007—Jeffrey Kilbride, 41, and James Schaffer, 41, both of Paradise Valley, Ariz have been sentenced to more than five years in prison for their role in a spam email scam that resulted in the sending of millions of pornographic email spam messages. This conviction is the first major case under the 2003 federal CAN SPAM anti spam law, according to ComputerWorld.com.
Prosecutors in the case stated that the two men, and three conspirators, sent millions of unsolicited, hard core pornographic image containing emails and that after the 2003 passage of the CAN SPAM act, Kilbride and Schaffer routed traffic through Dutch servers, created fake adult content oriented website names, and engaged in other types of activities designed to conceal the source of the spam emails. The pair has been fined $100,000 each, and have been ordered to pay $77,500 in restitution of AOL LLC and to forfeit approximately $1.1 million worth of profit made on the sites.
The spam email scam, which resulted in commissions for the two of over one million dollars each, for both men, was made possible by the help of three court identified co conspirators, Jennifer Clason, 32, of Tempe, Ariz; Andrew Elifson, 31, of Scottsdale, Ariz; and Kirk Rogers, 43 of Manhattan. All parties pleaded guilty and testified against Kilbride and Schaffer.
Clason, who was one of the first of the conspirators who elected to enter a guilty plea, was discovered in 2006 to have been using her Web site for work at home mothers, MommyJobs.com, to generate spam related emails and advertising, although prosecutors stress that no direct links to pornography were contained on MommyJobs.com.
“Apparently this guy that I had trusted for 5 years had lied to me,” Clason wrote on MommyJobs.com, claiming that she had been victimized. “Not only was his spam operation illegal, but he was also doing other shady stuff that I had no knowledge of, like money laundering!”
Clason’s sentencing, which has been postponed several times, is currently scheduled for November 26 of this year.
The site she operated, which as of press time was still up and presumably operational, advertises itself as a place where work at home mothers can go to obtain job leads, chat with others on message boards, and read informative articles on related topics. A section on the site warns work at home mothers to “beware of scams,” and lists “envelope stuffing jobs, jewelry assembling jobs, paid surveys, and pyramid schemes,” among the scams to be most wary of when searching for legitimate freelance employment.
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