With spam getting worse instead of better since the CAN-SPAM Act took effect in January, the U.S. and other countries are all but scrambling for ways to continue fighting it. Now, law enforcement officers from the U.S., Britain, and Australia will band up in an information-sharing, investigating, and cross-border enforcing spam violations, the Federal Trade Commission announced late July 2.
The FTC, Britain’s Office of Fair Trading and that country’s Information Commissioner, Britain’s Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and the Australian Communications Authority signed a memorandum of understanding last week. Under it, the three nations’ agencies will swap information and evidence, help each other find, track, and investigate spam, and coordinate where needed law enforcement action across borders against spam violators.
“Illegal spam does not respect national boundaries,” said FTC chairman Timothy J. Muris, announcing the trilateral memorandum. “This agreement is an important next step to help law enforcers on three continents leverage resources to combat illegal spam.”
British Communications Minister Stephen Timms said that this trilateral effort won’t solve spam overnight but would reinforce the three nations’ “determination to tackle it with a combination of industry initiatives, technical solutions, and user awareness.”
Acting Australian Communications Authority chairman Dr. Bob Horton said the memorandum offers “a framework” for cross-border spam fighting cooperation.
The FTC said the memorandum also calls for the involved agencies to push for a broad audience for an October meeting in London, gathering spam enforcement authorities from around the world to discuss the spam problem.
The memorandum was made public at about the same time the news arrived that the FBI is looking into an Internet scam – said to have involved nonexistent products and a fake online business – believed to have raised about $11 million from 1,600 investors around the U.S. over the past seventeen months. This was after officials in Oregon reportedly got thirteen investors’ complaints.
The business in question is believed to have pushed e-book marketing, offering expertise and consulting to new business opportunities, but details were said to be so sketchy if they existed at all that the FBI came to believe the business “never engaged in income-producing business,” according to published reports.
Those reports indicated federal prosecutors want to seize property bought with the proceeds, including a waterfront property in Washington State said to have been bought by Scott Louis Guenther; and, Shalimar, Florida property tied to Frank Richard Hendricks.
The two men are believed to be behind the scam through their Pacific Achievements International (PAI), though charges against them have yet to be filed. They’re suspected of targeting investors through the Internet, through Websites and possibly e-mail appeals, with their business incorporated in Nevada while some funds were moved through banks based in Corvallis, where Guenther is believed to have lived, the reports continued.
Indeed, the FBI is said to have discovered PAI in the first place when they got reports from “several banks,” including a Corvallis bank, about suspicious activity in the company’s accounts in 2003. Oregon state consumer fraud investigators began monitoring investors’ conference calls between Hendricks and investors, in which Hendricks reportedly promised bigger profits and urged patients, one report said.
