Don’t expect to see any more e-mail invitations to date lonely housewives. You’ll have to go back to hanging around PTA meetings like the rest of us now that a U.S. District Court Judge has ordered a temporary halt to “date lonely housewives” spam at the request of the Federal Trade Commission.
The parties believed to be responsible – Cleverlink Trading Limited, Real World Media LLC, and their principles, Brian D. Muir, Jesse Goldberg, and Caleb Wolf Wickman – have had assets frozen pending a hearing on the FTC’s request for preliminary and permanent injunctions due to violations of the CAN-SPAM Act.
“[The spam] contains misleading headers and deceptive subject lines,” the agency says in a statement. “It does not contain a link to allow consumers to opt out of receiving future spam, does not contain a valid postal address, and does not contain the disclosure, required by law, that it is sexually explicit. It also includes sexual materials in the initially viewable area of the e-mail, in violation of the FTC’s Adult Labeling Rule. The FTC has asked the court to permanently bar the illegal spam and to order the operation to give up its ill-gotten gains.”
The principles being charged are believed to control more than 180 Web sites registered to people around the world, use an offshore payment processor on the island of St. Kitts, have foreign bank accounts to collect spam proceeds, and use a Cyprus-based company name and address to front the operation. In reality, the FTC claims, the defendants are all based in California.
Sites with the Cleverlink Trading Company stamp on them are CheatingWivesIndustry.com and OnlineCheatingMILFs.com.
A copy of the complaint can be viewed here.
