If you're familiar with those "Married But Lonely" e-mails from a while back, you might be interested to know that the Federal Trade Commission has settled with the two men believed to be behind the spam scam in which they exposed the unwitting - including children, the FTC said - to sexually explicit materials.
This case involving Brian Westby of Missouri and Martijn P. Bevelander of the Netherlands predated the new federal CAN-SPAM law. Westby and Bevelander will have to give up $112,500 worth of what they made from the scheme, and are also barred from using false subject lines and header information in e-mail as well.
The FTC sued the pair in April 2003, charging Westby and Bevelander with sending spam whose subject lines often as not disguised the actual content of the e-mails, lines like "Did you hear the news?" and "New movie info." Those and other such bland subject lines, the FTC said, were disguises to lure recipients into opening e-mails that actually contained erotic solicitations to join adult Websites such as Married But Lonely.
"Because of the deceptive subject lines, consumers had no reason to expect to see such material," the commission said announcing the settlement. "In some cases, consumers may have opened the e-mails in their offices, in violation of company policies. In other cases, children may have been exposed to inappropriate adult-oriented material."
The messages included hyperlinks or e-mail addresses for consumers who wanted to unsubscribe or stop getting the messages but those who did hit those links got error messages instead.
Westby and Bevelander were also accused of using fake "reply to" or "from" information, a practice known as spoofing, which resulted in thousands of undeliverable e-mails flooded back to the computer systems of those unwitting third parties, the FTC said, "deluging their computer systems with an influx of undeliverable spam." And that, in turn, provoked a deluge of angry e-mails from the spammed to the wrongly identified innocent bystanders, the commission added.
The settlement will be divided as $87,500 from Westby and $25,000 from Bevelander.
