New Zealander Lance Atkinson and American Jody Smith were at the centre of the world's largest internet spam operation, dubbed "AffKing", having recruited spammers from around the world has been ordered to pay more than $16 million for running the illegal enterprise. They sent billions of emails directing recipients to websites advertising bogus male enhancement drugs and weight loss pills shipped from India, which they falsely claimed had come from a licensed pharmacy in the US.
Atkinson who lives in Queensland and Smith from Texas allegedly controlled a "botnet" of 35,000 computers, capable of sending 10 billion email messages a day.
Servers in China hosted the websites and the drugs were shipped from India, while operatives in Cyprus and the former Soviet republic of Georgia processed credit card information.
Atkinson had previously admitted sending spam and was fined $100,000 by a New Zealand court, but the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) saw that further punishment was due. Yesterday, the Commission fined him $16 million in a decision mirroring that of the Federal Court in Brisbane in October, which handed the same penalty to handed to two SMS spamming companies.
Atkinson's Australian-registered company, Inet Ventures, is one of four companies targeted by the FTC over the operation, which encouraged people to click through to websites that allegedly used false claims to peddle prescription drugs, as well as "male enhancement" and weight-loss pills.
The FTC received more than 3 million complaints about the spam and related websites, illustrating the scale of the operation, officials said.
The sites, including one called Canadian Healthcare, were difficult to distinguish from legitimate online pharmacies - making the pitches more persuasive.
SEO: global spam email operation, Herbal King operation, AffKing spammers
Read more: http://www.blogtactic.com/search/label/Attack%20Site#ixzz0y1pcsHLM
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
No comments:
Post a Comment