One of cyberspace's most notorious mousetrappers – using slightly altered spellings of actual Website names to hijack surfers to his barrage of popup ads and porn sites – has been arrested again. Only this time, John Zuccarini may be setting a precedent: he's said to be the first mousetrapper arrested under an Amber Alert provision making it a crime to use fake Web addresses to lure children to adult sites.
Zuccarini was arrested at a motel here September 3, accused of mousetrapping surfers aiming for Disneyland and the Teletubbies to adult Web pages. Authorities say Zuccarini registered thousands of Web addresses and earned as much as $1 million a year from them, "much of it from sex sites that paid him when he sent Web users their way," U.S. Attorney James Comey told the Associated Press.
Mousetrapping techniques include the one Zuccarini is accused of using, using real and known Web addresses with omitted or transposed letters, drawing misspelling or mistyping surfers to the porn sites, officials told the AP. His targets beside Disneyland and Teletubbies surfers are also said to have included those looking for music star Britney Spears and numerous cartoon characters.
The surfers drawn into Zuccarini's mousetraps got hit with a fury of popup ads that hit the surfers with even more ads if they tried using their back buttons or tried closing the windows altogether, the AP added.
Zuccarini is being held without bail in Fort Lauderdale at this writing, with a September 5 court appearance scheduled.
Zuccarini has been on the federal radar since 1999. According to the FTC, he's lost 53 state and federal lawsuits, and he has had nearly 200 Web addressed confiscated by authorities. And, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ordered Zuccarini to shut down his operation in April 2002.
That was about seven months after the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint charging him with using over 5,500 copycat Web addresses to hijack and mousetrap surfers looking for Spears, the Cartoon Network cable television channel, roping them instead to sites ranging from porn to Internet gambling. The order also banned Zuccarini from taking part in advertising affiliate programs and from selling online, and ordered him to forfeit over $1.8 million.
In that scheme, Zuccarini's mousetraps concurrently launched the actual Websites the surfers were trying to reach in the first place, tricking them into thinking the barrage of popup ads were coming from the sites themselves.
Other sites for which Zuccarini used misspellings for mousetrapping included sites for Victoria's Secret, The Wall Street Journal, and the Backstreet Boys. In fact, authorities in New York, where The Wall Street Journal is headquartered, are reportedly pushing to have Zuccarini prosecuted there, the AP said.
