Canning spam, even with a new federal law in place, isn’t easy. But the government has had some success with a case under way in Chicago.
In an action brought by the Federal Trade Commission, Federal District Judge James Holderman recently issued a preliminary injunction against a Michigan firm, Phoenix Avatar LLC, that forbids it from sending unsolicited e-mail and freezes the firm’s assets.
Holderman found there’s a likelihood that Phoenix is in violation of the anti-spam law as well as the more general FTC act. Phoenix is still free to argue its innocence and overturn the injunction.
The men behind Phoenix are Daniel Lin, James Lin, Mark Sadek and Christopher Chung.
According to the FTC’s complaint, the men generated e-mails promoting the sale of patches for about $60 each that they claimed would cause users to lose weight. The men had purchased these magic patches for about a tenth of what they charged their customers.
Incredible claims regarding weight loss or other physical enhancements are at the core of spam solicitations, and spam recipients should discount them.
That some people would spend $60 buying into such scams may be surprising. But the truly amazing part of the FTC case is that in a three-month period, the defendants stuffed $426,600 into their bank account from credit card payments.
The FTC produced testimony from expert witnesses that the patches are worthless as weight reduction tools and that the defendants had illegally disguised the origin of their e-mails.
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One witness was Brent Deterding, who works with LURHQ Corp., a Lombard-based managed-security-services firm. Deterding testified that a majority of spam is sent through “open proxy,” a system whereby spammers hijack computers owned by innocent people to cover their tracks.
These computers are usually owned by consumers rather than by businesses, Deterding said.
“Some spammers have infected up to 10,000 home computers that they recruit as `zombie armies’ to send millions of e-mails,” he said.
Home-computer users who don’t regularly install patches and anti-virus fixes to protect their operating system are most vulnerable to being infected, Deterding said.
Computer users who visit pornography and hacker sites are especially vulnerable to infecting their machines with malicious code, he said.
“Enforcing anti-spam laws is difficult,” he said. “But the spammers wouldn’t be in business if computer users were smart enough to resist their pitches.
“If a stranger walks up to you on the street making unbelievable offers, you should walk away. The same is true online.”
U. of I. light center: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will establish a center to study superfast communications using light with $6.2 million in federal funding.
The center will seek to improve laser technology and is building upon an ultrafast light-emitting transistor discovered last year by Illinois researchers Milton Feng and Nick Holonyak Jr.
“The center will address the high-performance optical switching and data-routing technologies needed for flexible connections and efficient bandwidth delivery in next-generation communications systems,” said Norman K.Y. Cheng, an Illinois engineer who will direct the new center.
Illinois will be the lead institution for the center. Partners include Columbia University, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Harvard University.