The first to be charged under a federal law criminalizing the use of fake Internet addresses to trick children into seeing porn sites - using misspelled domain names like Disneyland, Britney Spears, Teletubbies, and others - is going to prison for 30 months.
John Zuccarini was sentenced February 26 for violating a portion of the Amber Alert law known as the Truth in Domain Names Act, which took effect last year, ending a life that involved him eluding authorities for several years until his arrest in southern Florida last year. He pleaded guilty in the case December 10, 2003 in federal court.
The Philadelphia native had even admitted he registered altered domains familiar to children because they were more likely than their parents or other elders to misspell names when typing Web addresses into search or location bars. He was said to have earned up to $1 million a year from the porn site operators to which he tricked the children involved, getting paid between 10 and 25 cents a hit for every hit he lured to the porn sites.
Adult Sites Against Child Pornography executive director Joan Irvine applauded the sentencing.
"Parents are alarmed and vocal about their children unknowingly being exposed to adult content," Irvine told AVNOnline.com. "They are blaming the adult entertainment industry and spam. However, one of the causes of this problem is a criminal like Zuccarini, who misspells Internet domains... to lure children to pornographic Websites and then sell that traffic.
"All he was concerned about was the money, and he had no regard for what he did to the millions of children who viewed his sites. The professional business people are trying to weed out these criminals as they give the industry a bad name and are not representative of the whole industry."
Zuccarini was arrested in Hollywood, Florida in early September, and extradited to New York within five days of his arrest. Authorities finally captured him when his e-mail was tracked to a waterfront hotel in Hollywood, where he had lived for about ten months prior to his arrest.
Known sometimes as the "Porn Piper," Zuccarini was known as one of cyberspace's most notorious mousetrappers long before he was arrested. He had previously lost 53 state and federal lawsuits - complainants had included Dow Jones and the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues - and had almost two hundred Web addresses confiscated by authorities, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
He was also ordered to close his operation down in April 2002 by a federal judge in Pennsylvania, seven months after the FTC accused him of making mousetraps to adult and other Websites like online gaming, using names like Spears, the Cartoon Network cable television network, The Wall Street Journal, Victoria's Secret, and the Backstreet Boys, as well as assorted individual cartoon characters.
Earlier, in October 2001, the FTC shut down over 5,000 Websites belonging to Zuccarini, after they accused him of running a mousetrap scheme that caught Web surfers in stream after stream of endless pop-ups, virtually holding their computers hostage. That followed a seven-month probe provoking the FTC to accuse him of fraud.
"After one FTC staff member closed out of 32 separate windows, leaving just two windows on the task bar, he selected the ?back? button, only to watch as the same seven windows that initiated the blitz erupted on his screen, and the cybertrap began anew," according to a filing in federal court in that 2001 case.
