FTC Socks "PlayStation 2 Spammers" Over Porn Site Scam

The Federal Trade Commission has spanked the so-called "PlayStation 2 Spammers," defendants charged with sending a volume of spam promising free Sony PlayStation systems in order to trick recipients to adult Websites then re-routing them through 1-900 telephone numbers with "significant" charges per minute.

The settlement between the FTC and the spammers bans Christopher Baith, Cosme Monarrez, Jr., and Sorabh Verma from engaging in any future misrepresentative activities and from sending spam misrepresenting their identities or that of their e-mail's subjects. Baith was ordered to pay $10,000 by a federal court which agreed to let him pay $2,500, but he'll be forced to pay the remainder if he's found to have misrepresented his financial situation, the FTC said.

The PlayStation 2 Spammers' e-mails typically had subject lines like "Yahoo Sweepstakes Winner" and "You have just won a gift from Yahoo," the FTC said, but if the recipient hit the hyperlink to collect the prizes, they were sent to a Yahoo lookalike Website featuring Yahoo's logo, graphics, and "Copyright ©2001 Yahoo, Inc. All rights reserved."

Consumers who received the e-mails saw instructions to press "yes" to download software needed to complete a prize claim form and were instructed that the connection would be toll-free – but clicking "yes" and finishing the download got them reconnected to 1-900 lines charging them up to $3.99 per minute for the connection, the commission said.

Consumers were also never told downloading and executing the software would bring them such charges, while the PlayStation prize promises were false and deceptive, the FTC said.

Separately, but involving the same operation, BTV Industries, the company which made the modem dialer Baith, Monarrez and Verma were said to have used in their scam, will settle charges with the FTC, the commission said. They're accused of violating FTC regulations by not disclosing clearly that using their software would tie them to a 1-900 line charging up to $3.99 a minute. BTV has already surrendered $25,000 in "ill-gotten gains," the commission said.