Spammer Busted on Arrival at LAX

After threatening to sell his spamming code to like-minded individuals unless an online community program gave him an exclusive marketing contract, Anthony Greco was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport February 16 when he landed for what he believed were negotiations to hammer out the deal.

The eighteen-year-old upstate New Yorker was hit under the federal CAN-SPAM law on charges that he broadcast at least 1.5 million ads for porn and cheap mortgages to MySpace.com users last fall, prompting user complaints and a company move to block his programs. He faces up to eighteen years behind bars if convicted on all charges against him.

MySpace.com worked with federal and local law enforcement until prosecutors lured him from his upstate New York home to Los Angeles by dangling a meeting with MySpace.com's president.

In November, according to a law enforcement affidavit, Greco offered MySpace.com $150 a day to allow him an exclusive marketing deal for his TGCashin, Inc. and the products he promoted, and said that unless he got the deal, he'd sell his software program—capable of creating tens of thousands of customer accounts and using those to send the maximum 500 messages per account per day on MySpace.com.

"It's absolutely unsurprising that spammers would find a new way to spread their slime through any crack and crevice available," said Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy president Anne Mitchell, when learning of Greco’s arrest and MySpace.com.

Gartner, Inc. analyst Lawrence Orans told reporters he saw something else in the arrest: alarm, because Greco in theory could have steered people to sites spreading spyware or malware.

America Online—which says one percent of their AOL Instant Messenger traffic is instant messaging spam, or spim—filed the first known lawsuit against a suspected instant message spammer at about the time Greco’s spam provoked MySpace user complaints. AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham told reporters the battle against conventional spam may have forced people like Greco to find new ways to flush their messages, including instant messaging.

TGCashin, Inc. promotes primarily adult photo and video Websites, but Greco also got involved promoting some low-rate mortgage packages as well, according to authorities. The irony: he often urged potential partners to link to his company “by any means that are legal” and recommended they obey the same law he’s accused of breaking.