Five days after his Florida arrest, one of cyberspace's most notorious repeat spammers agreed to be sent to New York. And he'll be greeted with a federal charge of using spelling mistakes and typographical errors to lure children to porn sites – the first in the United States to be so charged under Amber Alert law.
John Zuccarini – held without bail in Fort Lauderdale since his September 3 arrest – is accused of registering thousands of Web domains using altered spellings of familiar enough names to "mousetrap" people including children to his adult and other connected Websites, earning as much as $1 million a year mostly from pay-per-hit deals, according to prosecutors in the case.
He was captured in the first place after his e-mail was tracked to a waterfront hotel in Hollywood, Florida, where he had lived for ten months, according to the Newark Star-Ledger.
Amber Alert law criminalizes using misleading Web addresses to target children in cyberspace. Zuccarini's Florida arrest accused him of using subtle variations on the names of Disneyland and the Teletubbies.
The Star-Ledger said some of the sites Zuccarini's mousetraps launched re-routed traffic to a warning page for Hanky-Panky-College, which investigators told the paper led to a seemingly endless maze of porn sites.
Zuccarini already had a history as one of the most notorious mousetrappers in cyberspace. He's lost 53 state and federal lawsuits and had almost 200 Web addresses confiscated by authorities, according to the Federal Trade Commission. A federal judge in Pennsylvania also ordered him to shut his operation down in April 2002.
Seven months earlier, the FTC slapped him with a complaint accusing him of making mousetraps to adult and other Websites like online gambling, from names like singer Britney Spears, the Cartoon Network cable television network, the Wall Street Journal, Victoria's Secret, and the Backstreet Boys, not to mention assorted cartoon characters.
The federal judge's order also banned Zuccarini from taking part in advertising affiliate programs and from selling online, plus forfeiting over $1.8 million.
