Spammer &#39;bounty hunters&#39; will need rewards of up to $2,50,000: FTC
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WASHINGTON: The US government should be prepared to spend freely if it decides to encourage &quot;bounty hunters&quot; to track down e-mail spammers, the US Federal Trade Commission said.
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Federal prosecutors contend a businessman known for pledging money to help track down criminals has pocked $3.2 million of income over the past several years while not paying federal taxes since 2000.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked a federal court to require an alleged Web page hijacking operation to obey previous orders barring unfair and deceptive practices.Walter Rines, business partner Sanford Wallace, and Rines&#39; company, Online Turbo Merchant, diverted users of MySpace.com to other Web sites and barraged them with ads to earn advertising commissions, according to court papers filed with the FTC. The defendants used pagejacking, phishing, and other methods to target MySpace users in violation of a previous court order, the FTC said in a news release.The FTC, in a Jan. 23 filing, asked the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire to order the defendants to give up the money they earned from their MySpace scheme.Rines&#39; listed phone number in New Hampshire was disconnected.In October 2005, the FTC charged Odysseus Marketing and its owner, Rines, with luring consumers to their Web site by offering free software, including a program that supposedly allowed them to engage in anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing. The software was bundled with spyware that intercepted and replaced search results and barraged consumers&#39; computers with pop-up ads, the FTC said. The software also stole users&#39; personal information, and users were unable to locate or uninstall the spyware through reasonable means, the FTC said.The FTC alleged that the defendants&#39; software captured consumers&#39; personal information and transmitted the information to the defendants&#39; servers. Consumers were unable to locate or uninstall the spyware through reasonable means, the agency charged. The court ordered a preliminary halt to these practices pending trial, and in October 2006 Odysseus and Rines settled the charges by stipulating to a permanent injunction.The permanent injunction prohibited the defendants from redirecting consumers&#39; computers; from changing any Web browser&#39;s default home page; and from modifying or replacing the functions of any computer application. It required Rines and his company to obtain consumers&#39; express consent before downloading or distributing any content to their computers.The permanent injunction also imposed a $1.75 million judgment, and all but $10,000 was suspended based on the defendants&#39; inability to pay.In its recent filing, the FTC alleges that Rines, his company, and Wallace knew of the permanent injunction and violated that order by diverting users from MySpace.com to their Web sites.
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A screensaver targeting spam-related websites could help drive spammers out of business.
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Try not to smile: A top spammer may be sentenced to hard time.
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Spammers exploit your Achillesâ heel (or other body part).
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A variation of spam is sliding past spam filters into inboxes, but it&#39;s not likely the new trick will be successful much longer, a security expert said Thursday.The spam messages, urging recipients to buy a stock, have an MP3 audio attachment but no subject line or text, said John Graham-Cumming, an anti-spam consultant and researcher who is based in France.&quot;I think this is the first time we&#39;ve seen this,&quot; said Graham-Cumming, who tracks new kinds of spam.The audio messages, which vary in length, contain a warbled, robotic voice with a British accent encouraging people to invest in Exit Only, a company that owns a Web site, www.Text4Cars.com, which connects vehicle buyers and sells through SMS (Short Message Service). Exit Only says it&#39;s not involved in sending the spam.Graham-Cumming said the spam falls into the category of &quot;pump and dump&quot; fraud. Scammers invest in a company with a low-priced stock and send out a round of spam, causing gullible investors to buy it and increase the stock&#39;s price.As the stock price peaks, fraudsters cash out, which causes the stock to precipitously fall, burning other investors. The practice is illegal.Exit Only was trading around $0.41 on Thursday. Not much detail is available on the company, but it issued a news release on Tuesday heralding the launch of its Text4Cars service in the Los Angeles area. The news release said the company hoped to be fully launched in the United States in early 2008.Exit Only&#39;s CEO, David Dion, said he learned of the spam around Wednesday morning. He has since notified the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and said his company has nothing to do with the spam run.&quot;I am very distraught by this,&quot; Dion said.Dion said only about 100 shares have been traded so far, so the scam hasn&#39;t been successful.The messages are more annoying than harmful. But there are a variety of defenses e-mail administrators and security companies can employ to stop it, Graham-Cumming said.Spam filters can be configured to cull messages with MP3s, since most companies don&#39;t have a business use for the file type, Graham-Cumming said. Administrators can also change their e-mail server settings to slow down the speed at which they receive messages with MP3 attachments, he said.That method has been proven to frustrate spammers, who typically shut down the connection if the spam isn&#39;t going through quickly enough since the delay consumes valuable bandwidth, Graham-Cumming said.These spam messages are also relatively large -- around 100KB -- compared to other spam, which may be another reason this kind of spam may not be around for long. Spam messages with larger file sizes require more bandwidth to send, meaning spammers can&#39;t send out high volumes of messages, Graham-Cumming said.&quot;Honestly, my prediction is this is going to be around for a while and disappear,&quot; he said.E-mail security company MessageLabs said it was catching about 10,000 spam messages with MP3s per hour since late Wednesday night.
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Alleged spammer Jeremy Jaynes must pay $1 million in bail for sending as many as 15 million junk e-mails a day and bilking recipients of millions of dollars, a Virginia judge ordered this week.
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The Dutch telecom and postal watchdog OPTA has levied fines as high as 42,500 euros ($57,540) against several individuals and small companies for sending out spam messages.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is looking for victims of a data breach at ChoicePoint announced in early 2005. Victims with out-of-pocket expenses due to the breach have until Aug. 18 to file claims and be eligible for payments from a $5 million fund that ChoicePoint agreed to pay in its January 2006 settlement with the FTC. The FTC has now mailed reimbursement claim forms to 2,400 consumers who may have been victims of identity theft due to the breach, the agency said in a speech. The FTC has mailed claim forms to 1,000 consumers since December 2006, it said. In addition, the FTC has created a Web site where consumers who do not receive a claim letter can download a claim form and get more information about the claims process. Data broker ChoicePoint announced in early 2005 that identity thieves had set up fake businesses as a way to buy personal information from the company. The breach, affecting about 163,000 U.S. residents, set off a debate in the U.S. Congress about data breach protections, but Congress has yet to pass a data breach notification bill. In its January 2006 settlement with the FTC, ChoicePoint agreed to pay a $10 million fine in addition to the $5 million victims fund. The company also agreed to third-party security audits every other year until 2026. ChoicePoint also agreed in May to pay a $500,000 fine and change the way it screens new customers in a settlement with 43 states and the District of Columbia. Claim forms must be postmarked by Aug. 18. The amount applicants receive will depend on a number of factors, including the total number and size of claims that the agency receives, the FTC said.
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FTC alleges that Sanford Wallace distributed spyware that created pop-up ads on victims&#39; computers in order to sell his company&#39;s anti-spyware software.
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The tech behemoth targets more spammers for lawsuits.
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A Norwegian commission has proposed a law that would punish spammers, or senders of junk e-mail, with fines and up to three years in prison.
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Application that claimed to "spam the spammers" caused much controversy.
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The agency said this week that it had settled with a spammer who had failed to tell consumers they actually had to spend money to receive "free" products.
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THE US Federal Trade Commission said that it had released a report which assessed whether offering bounties to turn in spammers would help stem the flood.
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Rewards could be offered to people who inform on companies or individuals defrauding the government.