Pr0n spamsters are sentenced to over five years

TWO RINGLEADERS of a lucrative spam operation that promoted pornographic websites have each been sentenced to more than five years in federal prison, reports the East Valley Tribune in Phoenix, Arizona.

Convicted of felonies last June for conspiracy, fraud, money laundering and obscenity, James R. Schaffer, 41, of Paradise Valley, Arizona, and Jeffrey A. Kilbride, 41, of Venice, California, were sentenced to imprisonment for 63 months and 72 months, respectively. Kilbride got handed a longer sentence for attempting to prevent a witness from testifying.

Schaffer, Kilbride and three others ran a spam operation for a little over a year in 2003 that netted $1.1 million for hits and commissions on subscriptions to porn sites, according to US federal prosecutors. Their spam emails contained explicit porn images visible to recipients, and heavily targeted America Online (AOL) and the US Federal Trade Commission together received more than 1.5 million spam complaints.

The other spammers, including Jennifer Clason, 32, of Tempe, Arizona, Andrew Ellifson, 31, of Scottsdale, Arizona, and Kirk Rogers, 43, of Manhattan Beach, California, pleaded guilty previously, testified at trial against Schaffer and Kilbride, and still await later sentencings.

The defendants were sentenced after a three week long sentencing hearing in which eight witnesses from different states all across the US testified about the unsolicited, explicitly pornographic emails they and other members of their families, including children, received.

In addition to catching serious prison time, Schaffer and Kilbride were each fined $100,000 and ordered to pay restitution of $77,500 to AOL. US District Judge David G. Campbell also ordered the pair to jointly forfeit their illegal profit of $1.1 million.

After the US CAN-SPAM Act was passed in 2003, the defendants tried to avoid prosecution by falsely representing that their Phoenix based spam operation was located offshore. That obviously didn't work, because the US Justice Department released a statement saying that theirs was the first prosecution under the obscenity provisions of US CAN-SPAM Act.

So yes, sex does sell, spam works and therefore isn't likely to be going away, and people do subscribe to porn websites. But sending explicit porn spam to children is a really bad idea. µ

L'INQ
East Valley Tribune