A federal grand jury in Missouri has indicted two brothers and two other people on charges related to an alleged e-mail spamming case that targeted more than 2,000 U.S. colleges and sold more than US$4.1 million worth of products to students, the U.S. Department of Justice announced.

Indicted were Amir Ahmad Shah, age 28, of St. Louis; his brother, Osmaan Ahmad Shah, age 25, of Columbia, Missouri; Liu Guang Ming, a citizen of China; and Paul Zucker, age 55, of Wayne, New Jersey, the DOJ said. Also named in the indictment, unsealed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, was the Shahs' business, I2O.

“Nearly every college and university in the United States was impacted by this scheme,” Matt Whitworth, acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri, said in a statement. “Illegal hacking and e-mail spamming wreaks havoc on computer networks. These schools spent significant funds to repair the damage and to implement costly preventive measures to defend themselves against future intrusions."

The Shahs allegedly developed e-mail extracting programs, which they used to illegally harvest more than 8 million student e-mail addresses from more than 2,000 colleges and universities, the DOJ said. They allegedly used this database of e-mail addresses to send targeted spam e-mails selling various products and services, including digital cameras, spring break travel offers and pepper spray, the DOJ said.

The Shahs conducted at least 31 of these spam e-mail marketing campaigns directed at students, the indictment says.

The Shahs used false and misleading information in the spam e-mails, suggesting they had an association with the university or college that the student receiving the spam attended, the DOJ said. They allegedly used fictitious names and purported to be “campus representatives." They also falsely claimed that the businesses that sold the products in the spam e-mail were “alumni-owned” companies, the DOJ said.

The Shahs earned referral fees for sending spam for products and services sold by others, and they also made money by buying products in bulk and reselling them, the DOJ alleged.

The Shahs hired several employees -- who are not named in the indictment -- to help develop the e-mail extraction program and create the Web sites to market and sell the products and services advertised in their spam e-mails. The Shahs allegedly used mass-mailing software programs to falsify e-mail header information and to avoid spam filters by rotating subject lines, reply addresses, message content and URLs, and other information in the e-mail header and e-mail body content, the DOJ said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.