Two men were convicted in Arizona Monday on eight criminal counts, including money laundering and transportation of obscene
materials, in connection with running a pornographic spamming business, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
A jury in U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona in Phoenix convicted Jeffrey A. Kilbride, 41, of Venice, California,
and James R. Schaffer, 41, of Paradise Valley, Arizona, on all eight counts they faced. The trial, which began June 5, was
the first to include charges under the Controlling the Assault of Non-solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act,
a law passed by the U.S. Congress in 2003 in an effort to crack down on unsolicited commercial e-mail.
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The men made "millions of dollars by sending unwanted sexually explicit emails to hundreds of thousands of innocent people,
including families and children," Alice Fisher, assistant attorney general for the DOJ's Criminal Division, said in a statement.
Kilbride and Schaffer started their spamming operation in 2003, and the two made more than US$2 million by sending out spam
e-mail advertising porn Web sites, the DOJ said. The two earned a commission for each person directed to one of the Web sites.
"Hard-core" pornographic images were embedded in each e-mail, and were visible to any person who opened the e-mail, the DOJ
said.
Kilbride and Schaffer were convicted of two violations of the CAN-SPAM Act. One of the counts charged that Kilbride and Schaffer
sent multiple electronic commercial mail messages containing falsified header information. In the other count, the two were
charged with sending e-mail using domain names that were registered using false information.
Kilbride and Schaffer were also convicted on one count of conspiring to commit fraud in connection with electronic mail and
four counts of felony obscenity charges for transporting hard-core pornographic images of adults. They were also convicted
on a federal money laundering charge for moving funds inside and out of the U.S. to conceal the ownership of those funds.
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
