14 DAY TRIAL // Only the sixth company to settle an U.S. Federal Trade Commission complaint for sending porn spam since 2005, Cyberheat from Tucson, Arizona, has agreed to pay the $413,000 as a penalty for its actions. The Company did not directly send the spam to the recipients, but it operated an affiliate marketing program paying others to send it on the company's behalf.
The settlement, apart from paying the large sum of money, prohibits Cyberheat from spam e-mail marketing and is required to monitor the affiliates from now on, to ensure that they are complying with the law, PC World reports. The complaint was based on the messages exposing children and others to sexual images without their consent. According to the law, the emails should have the words "Sexually Explicit" in their subject line and that the initially viewable area does not contain graphic sexual images.
Other charges brought to Cyberheat are that the affiliate markets did not provide an opt-out mechanism for those who wanted to unsubscribe from receiving the messages. The emails did not provide a postal address for the company, according to the FTC, as the Can-Spam Act requires. All the above violated the Act and the Adult Labeling rule, making the $413,000 look like a decent sum to pay. The penalty should suit the crime.
The total sum of money being paid since 2005 over the previous 5 similar settlements comes up to a whooping 1.6 billion dollars in civil penalties. Cyberheat is responsible for the affiliate networks' actions because it induced them to send the porn spam by offering to give financial benefits to those who managed to successfully attract subscribers to its web sites, the law reads. The Federal Trading Commission has been keeping an eye out for such cases, in an attempt to correlate efforts with the other Internet agencies trying to prevent the young from sexually explicit material.