U.S. porn spammers get five years in prison

Two email porn spammers, Jeffrey Kilbride and James Schaffer, have been sentenced to more than five years in federal prison this weekend. The two men started their operation in 2003 after buying lists of email addresses, with each address representing a commission if its owner clicked on a link to visit the X-rated site.

Following the introduction of the CAN-SPAM Act in the US, the spam operation began routing its messages through servers in Amsterdam in an attempt to disguise the origination point for the e-mail. Furthermore, the defendants used bank accounts in Mauritius and the Isle of Man to disguise the flow of revenues resulting from the operation.

According to prosecutors, Kilbride and Schaffer earned more than $2 million in commissions over four years. They were convicted on Friday of charges including conspiracy, money laundering, fraud and transportation of obscene material after a three-week trial in Arizona, in what marks the first prosecution under the CAN-SPAM Act.