We warned you a week ago and now it's official - you'd better make damn sure your adult Web site visitors come there of their own free will, or the Federal Trade Commission is coming after you with both barrels loaded and some international help where needed.
Both the United States and Australia announced Wednesday raids and a crackdown on pagejackers - Web spinners who set it up so that surfers trying to get to a particular site get zapped instead into a loop of porn sites from which they can't leave right away.
At their Wednesday news conference, the FTC estimated that as many as 25 million of the approximate one billion pages on the World Wide Web have been pagejacked.
And officials say the cyberspace variant of the old bait-and-switch routine gets Web surfers, including children, stuck indefinitely in such loops - surfers who try either backing up their Web browser or exiting entirely are often as not kept in a loop to more porn sites when they try to exit. Sometimes, it can take as many as seven or even ten exit attempts before they break the loop.
As we reported last week, a major concern is that this kind of hijacking cheats the surfers' intended visiting sites out of potential revenues - and the FTC has broad powers to chase unfair or deceptive practices in commerce, e- or otherwise.
The FTC says that cheating involves the page-jackers making money by selling ads and showing clients they receive a large number of hits on the pages - hits forced, of course, on unwilling users, of which the clients are unaware.
In fact, according to court papers, a game site, Adrenaline Vault (www.avault.com), was pagejacked and company representatives got no help from the FBI or state and local authorities - despite the pagejacking costing them thousands a day. In addition, the papers say, the company was considering a $20 million sale of a share of itself when the pagejacking occurred. They got no help until the FTC became interested.
By videophone hookup at Wednesday's press conference, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Allan Asher said eight locations were raided by Australian authorities hours before, taking in enough information for possible criminal or civil actions. Although he mentioned no names, according to Fox News, legal papers say the Australians are probing WTFRC Pty Ltd. and its offshoots Kewl Photographies, Kool Images, taboosisters, taboohardcore.com, and tabooanimals.com.
And a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia has shut down Web access for a Portugese man, Carlos Pereira, doing business as Atariz.com, among other names. Portugese authorities apparently cooperated with this investigation. Pereira is accused of pagejacking sites and re-submitting them to search engines using false addresses, Fox News says.
In the U.S., the serious pagejacking story began last May, when MSNBC ran an item prompted by a University of Massachussetts Lowell professor, David Landrigan, who found several hundred hijacked Web pages warehoused on the Alta Vista search portal, then tipped off the cable network. He calls the practice "snake in the grass scam."
Landrigan was ultimately contacted by the FTC for information, leading to what's going to be the agency's one hundredth Internet case.
A pagejacking involves a Web page containing common words, duplicating the page, and hosting the counterfeit on the scam artist's computer. A search engine "spider" - Net-roaming software cataloguing keywords - hits the stolen page, without sensing the page was stolen and automatically putting the fake URL into its database with the keywords, MSNBC says.
From there, depending on how the scam artist modifies the stolen page, a one-line Java script can divert a surfer to any number of unintended or unwanted sites - without the surfer even seeing the page for which he was actually aiming.
And Landrigan has found, MSNBC said last week, that these hijackers don't necessarily discriminate among targeted sites - they've nicked surfer traffic from news sites, community groups, government sites, even children's game sites.
--- Philo Levin
