14 DAY TRIAL // James Schaffer, Paradise Valley, Arizona and Jeffrey Kilbride, Venice, California, were both convicted by a federal judge, being accused of conspiracy, fraud, transportation of obscene materials and money laundering. Security company Sophos said that the two men sent spam messages to millions of users, most of the emails containing pornographic pictures and trying to promote adult webpages. It seems that no less than 600.000 customers of America Online sent complaints to the company between 30 January and 9 June 2004. The entire spam campaign brought approximately $2 million to the spammers.
"This dirty duo used a variety of tricks to try and hide their whereabouts from the US authorities. These includes logging into remotely to servers based in Amsterdam to try and make their spam messages look like they originated from outside the USA, and using bank accounts in Mauritius and the Isle of Man," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.
This is not the first time when the spam messages are causing trouble for the people involved in these illegal actions. In the past, other spammers who tried to promote all kinds of stuff were also convicted after millions of inboxes were assaulted by unsolicited traffic. However, it is more and more difficult to identify the spammers because their techniques are becoming very hard to be discovered, not to mention their identities and sources of spamming.
"The spammers worked hard to protect themselves and disguise their identities, but didn't lose any sleep over the hundreds of thousands innocent families and children who were receiving their unwanted explicit emails," the Sophos representative added.
As usual, the security companies encourage the users to install powerful anti-spam solutions but, as long as there is no 100 percent efficient application, it's extremely difficult to block all the spam messages sent to your inbox.