Since the ban on fake-to-porn domain names or spam hasn't yet been passed by the U.S. Senate, never mind signed into law by President Bush, the Federal Trade Commission figures the way to do it until then is to take a fake-to-porner to court.
They've asked a federal judge to block a porn spammer who's using bland subject lines, fake return addresses, and empty reply links to shanghai e-mail recipients including chldren to porn sites...and of making them look like spammers when their hitting the fake reply links provoked an inadvertent round of counterspam.
The FTC accuses Brian Westby, of the St. Louis suburb of Ballwin, of driving Netizens to a Website called Married But Lonely, with such subject lines as "Did you hear the news?" and "New movie info" in the e-mails. "Because of the deceptive subject lines," the FTC said in an April 17 statement, "consumers had no reason to expect to see" the explicit solicitations to Westby's adult Websites.
"In some cases, consumers may have opened the e-mails in their offices, in violation of company policies," the FTC said in its formal complaint. "In other cases, children may have been exposed to inappropriate adult-oriented material."
Westby's fake-to-porn spoofing, the FTC complaint continues, resulted in thousands of undeliverable e-mails answering the fake reply-to information being flooded back into their computer systems, smothering them with spam that couldn't be delivered - and may have portrayed the victims themselves as spammers, sometimes provoking "hundreds of angry e-mails" from those who did get spammed as a result.
