Porn Spammers Sentenced to Prison (with only a little help from anti-spam laws)

It's off to the slammer for a couple spammers.

Jeffrey A Kilbride and James R Schaffer have been found guilty of multiple charges related to porn spam they sent back in 2004.

Court documents indicate they sent at least 600,000 spam messages in that campaign. It would seem likely the number is much, much greater than that. A campaign of less than several million messages would be unlikely to catch law enforcement's attention - let alone result in charges being filed. Most likely, the court prosecutors were able to successfully document that number of emails - the real total being unknown.

The pair have been sentenced to five years in prison, and will have to relinquish 1.3 million dollars they made.

The charges included:

While the last charge stems directly from the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, the other charges have nothing to do with anti-spam law. That's right, these guys would still likely be going to jail, even without our country's only national law regulating unsolicited email.

This points the finger back at enforcement. A huge portion of the email I get contains content that suggests illegal activities, yet the same offending campaigns continue for weeks or months on end. The path to spam free email is not covered with more legislation. If we're not able to enforce the existing laws, creating new ones will likely result in little further progress.

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