FTC Settles With Spammer
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Online advertiser Member Source Media used misleading bulk e-mail to drive traffic to its Web site, FTC says.
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FTC dishes out $1m penalty A social networking website has agreed to pay a $1m fine to settle with authorities over allegations that it collected, used and disclosed personal details of children under 13.â¦
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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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A law firm in Colorado has been fined by federal court after a spam filter intercepted an important court notice.
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Sanctions against botnet operators The Federal Trade Commission, the US consumer rights watchdog, has succeeded in shutting down four illegal spamming operations judged to have breached federal anti-spam laws. Targets of the lawsuits included an operation that offered the supposed chance to "date lonely wives" and two outfits that allegedly bombarded unwilling recipients with lurid ads for pornographic web sites, sent via compromised PCs.â¦
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has filed charges against a payment processing company, accusing it of attempting to debit consumers&#39; bank accounts for up to $200 million on behalf of dishonest merchants.Those consumers either never received the goods or received worthless items, said the FTC, which filed the complaint with seven other U.S. states. The payment company allegedly violated both federal and state consumer fraud laws, telemarketing rules, and FTC regulations regarding the unfair processing of payments.The payment processing company went by several names, which are listed in a FTC news release. The FTC alleges the company processed payments for fraudulent telemarketers and Internet-based merchants that used deceptive sales scripts and methods.About $69 million of the $200 million in transactions were either rejected by consumers or returned because of lack of proper payment authorization, the FTC said.The FTC wants to refund consumers and force the company to forfeit money it still holds from the fraud in addition to other civil penalties. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.The states that have joined the suit are Illinois, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, and Vermont.
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The FTC today issued a report assessing whether and how a system that rewards members of the public for tracking down spammers would or could help improve enforcement of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2002
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Tangled web An internet hijacker who allegedly registered 5,500 copycat web addresses in a bid to divert lost surfers onto a porno site has agreed to hand over $164,000 to settle charges brought against him by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).â¦
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Consumers harmed by a pyramid-scheme scam at SkyBiz.com have until the end of March to file claims through a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the agency announced.
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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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(InfoWorld) - "Ed," a retired spammer, built a considerable fortune sending e-mails that promoted pills, porn, and casinos. At the peak of his power, Ed says he pulled in $10,000 to $15,000 a week, storing the money in $20 bills in stacks of boxes. It was a life of greed and excess, one that preyed especially on vulnerable people hoping to score drugs or win money gambling on the Internet. From when he was expelled from high school at 17 until he quit his spam career at 22, Ed -- who does not reveal his full name but sometimes goes by SpammerX -- was part of an electronic underworld profiting from the Internet via spam. "Yes, I know I'm going to hell," said Ed, who spoke in London on Wednesday at an event hosted by IronPort Systems, a security vendor now owned by Cisco Systems. "I'm actually a really nice guy. Trust me." A quick-witted and affable guy who wears an earring and casual clothes, there was a time when Ed wasn't so nice. He sent spam to recovering gambling addicts enticing them to gambling Web sites. He used e-mail addresses of people known to have bought antianxiety medication or antidepressants and targeted them with pharmaceutical spam. In short, Ed said he was "basically what people hate about the Internet." He spent 10 hours a day, seven days a week studying how to send spam and avoid filtering technologies in security software designed to weed out garbage e-mail. Most spam filters are effective 99 percent of the time; he aimed for that remaining window, using tricks such as including slightly different images in his spam, which can fool filters into thinking the e-mail is legitimate. "The better I got at spam, the more money I made," Ed said. He would start a spam run by finding an online merchant who wanted to sell a product. Then he'd acquire a list of e-mail addresses -- another commodity that has spawned its own market in the world of spam. He'd also set up a domain name, included as a link in a spam message, that, if clicked, would redirect the recipient to the merchant's Web site, enabling Ed to get credit for the referral. The spam would then be sent from a network of hacker-controlled computers, called botnets. Those machines are often consumer PCs infected with malicious software that a hacker can control. Ed would "rent" time on those computers from another group of hackers that specialized in creating botnets. If one of the spam recipients bought something, Ed would get a percentage of the sale. For pharmaceuticals the commission was around 50 percent, he said. Response rates to spam tend to be a fraction of 1 percent. But Ed said he once got a 30 percent response rate for a campaign. The product? A niche type of adult entertainment: photos of fully clothed women popping balloons. To track the money, merchants set up a "referral sales page" where spammers can see how much they make from a spam run. Ed would log in frequently, watching the money increase. He was paid into electronic payment transfer accounts, such as e-gold or PayPal, or into his debit card account, which he could cash out in $20 bills. That became problematic when the cash became voluminous. He says he made $480,000 his last year of spamming. But the lifestyle of being a spammer was taking a toll. In essence, he had no life. It's hard to go into a bar and explain your job to a woman by saying "I advertise penis enlargement pills online," Ed said. "It doesn't go down very well." He rationalized his actions by saying spamming is not like robbing someone, although the lurid impact of spam was clear. Some nine million Americans have some dependence on prescription drugs, Ed said, and he noticed that the same people were buying different drugs each month. "These were addicts," he said. Additionally, "the product is always counterfeit to some degree. If you're lucky, sometimes it's a diluted version of the real thing," he said. Viagra is cut with amphetamines, and homemade pills are common from sketchy labs in countries such as China, India, and Fiji, Ed said. So Ed got out of the business. He's written a book, "Inside the Spam Cartel: Trade Secrets from the Dark Side," which he said has had some take-up inÂ law enforcement circlesÂ eager to learn more about the spam business, which he projects will only get worse. As broadband speeds increase, spammers will increasingly look to market goods by making VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls or sending out videos, Ed said. The ultimate unsolvable problem is users, who continue to buy products marketed by spam, making the industry possible. "I think in 10 years we'll still get spam," Ed said. "Be prepared to be bombarded." Â
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has begun mailing claim forms to more than 1,400 identity theft victims who spent money to clear up identity-theft problems due to a security breach at data broker ChoicePoint announced in early 2005.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has shut down four illegal e-mail spamming operations, including one that offered the opportunity to "date lonely wives," the agency said Thursday.
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FTC Filing Targets Malicious Spyware  Spyware has come under target of the Federal Trade Commission with a new complaint filed in federal court which is requesting that two Internet based advertising and software firms be closed. The FTC filing was made last week with a press conference to be scheduled for ...
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Porn marketer agrees to pays $465,000 in penalties, says FTC.
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The FTC weighs the advantages of rewarding people for identifying spammers. It&#39;s a more complex calculation than you might think.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)&#160;has settled a complaint with a Web-based company it accused of selling people&#39;s telephone records without permission, the agency said Monday.