FTC Shuts Down Californian Sex Spammers

by Glen Shapiro, LawAndTax-News.com, New York

31 May 2005

At the request of the Federal Trade Commission, a judge has shut down a US 'lonely housewives' spam operation which used a St Kitts payment processor and a Cyprus 'front' address.

US District Court Judge Amy St. Eve has ordered a temporary halt to the spamming and has frozen the assets of the outfit, pending a hearing on the FTC's request for a preliminary and permanent injunction for violations of federal law. The FTC complaint names Cleverlink Trading Limited, Real World Media, LLC and their principals, Brian D. Muir, Jesse Goldberg, and Caleb Wolf Wickman. The defendants are based in California.

The FTC said the group controls more than 180 websites, including wantmorebabes.com, hotobjectofdesire.biz, maxfulltime.info, wiveswhocheat69.biz and hookuptomorrow.com. According to the FTC, the messages are designed to make the recipients believe they come from "a purported Internet dating service containing lonely housewives who want casual sexual relationships."

"The purpose of the spam is to make money," the FTC complaint said. "The spam messages drive consumers to websites soliciting consumers to purchase access to the defendants' main membership site. The money that consumers pay for the membership site access goes directly to (the) defendants. In a four-month period alone, (the) defendants took in nearly 700,000 dollars in membership fees."

The FTC charges that the spam violates nearly every provision of the CAN-SPAM Act. It contains misleading headers and deceptive subject lines. It does not contain a link to allow consumers to opt out of receiving future spam, does not contain a valid postal address, and does not contain the disclosure, required by law, that it is sexually explicit. It also includes sexual materials in the initially viewable area of the e-mail, in violation of the FTC's Adult Labeling Rule. The FTC has asked the court to permanently bar the illegal spam and to order the operation to give up its ill-gotten gains.

The defendants use an offshore payment processor on the island of St. Kitts in the Caribbean, have foreign bank accounts to collect spam proceeds, and use a Cyprus-based company name and address to front the operation. According to the FTC, they route their spam messages through other people's computers, falsify contact e-mail addresses, and obscure tools that would allow a recipient to stop or complain about the spam. The FTC alleges that the operation is actually US-based and that the defendants are trying to conceal their identities from US law enforcers.

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