FTC Tells Diet Spam Sender to Stop

A district level judge has issued an order telling Sili Neutraceuticals LLC to stop sending spam messages.

The firm allegedly sent email messages promoting hoodia-based diet supplements that were not compliant with the 2003 CAN-SPAM act.

In addition, the judge said that the claimed benefits of their products had not been established. Other, similar products have been fined by the FTC in the past. Alternative, or natural health products frequently provide no benefits, but are yet purchased by trusting consumers.

The junk email campaign also promoted products that claimed to reverse aging through use of the active ingredient, HGH. HGH has a long track record of being promoted through online advertising. Many mail filter programs fail to consistently delete such messages due to the inherent risk of filtering a string as short as, "HGH." Doing so could result in wanted messages being deleted.

The FTC claims to have collected eight-five thousand unwanted mail messages sent in conjunction with Sili Neutraceuticals. A large portion of the messages were sent by exploiting weak security in online forms. While this type of behavior is explicitly banned by the CAN-SPAM act, this is the first time the FTC has enforced it.

In addition, the judge ruled that the accused company's assets be frozen. The future for Sili Neutraceuticals does not look bright.

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