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U.S. sues to log off junk e-mail
operator
Innocuous labels allegedly lead
to pornography sites
By Matt O'Connor, Tribune staff reporter. Tribune news
services contributed to this report
Published April 18, 2003
Federal regulators have gone to court in
Chicago to shut down a spam operation that has flooded consumers
across the country with e-mails containing innocuous subject lines
that fool many into opening the sexually graphic material, officials
said Thursday.
While spam e-mails represent a growing new
problem, the lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission alleged this
operation had an age-old motive: greed.
The
operator, Brian D. Westby of suburban St. Louis, was seeking to
attract business to his sexually oriented Web sites, and he profited
handsomely, making well over $1 million in less than a year, the FTC
said.
In launching an offensive against the problem in recent
months, the FTC has filed nearly 50 lawsuits nationwide directed at
spam operators, but the Chicago lawsuit marks the first time it has
targeted the deceptive use of subject lines in e-mails to disguise
their contents.
According to the suit, filed in U.S. District
Court, Westby was alleged to have tricked consumers into opening the
e-mails with bland subject lines such as "Did you hear the news?"
and "Wanna hear a joke?"
They were then greeted with images
of naked women and invitations to visit Westby's adult Web sites for
a fee, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit against Westby is also
one of the first by the FTC to go after "spoofing," the practice of
making it appear the e-mail came from someone else--an innocent
third party.
Often large volumes of undeliverable e-mails
bounce back to the spoofed addresses, crippling their computer
systems and deluging them with angry accusations from consumers who
mistakenly think they originated the spam.
This isn't the
only litigation against Westby in federal court in Chicago. In a
lawsuit filed in February, an unidentified Chicago woman alleged
Westby had used her photograph without her consent to try to entice
consumers to visit his adult Web sites. The woman had used the
photograph for a personals ad she posted on Yahoo for a month last
year.
Westby ignored the woman's repeated demands to cease
and desist using her photograph in ads that claimed she sought men
who would "spank, humiliate and tie her up," the lawsuit
said.
"She essentially lost all control over her identity,"
said attorney Charles Lee Mudd Jr., who represents the woman,
identified in the lawsuit only as Jane Doe.
Westby, of
Ballwin, Mo., couldn't be reached for comment on the
lawsuits.
In November the FTC joined together with other
federal, state and local law enforcement to announce an initiative
to fight deceptive spam and Internet scams.
Brightmail Inc.,
a major vendor of anti-spam software, recorded 6.7 million instances
of junk mail messages being sent out in March alone, a 78 percent
increase from a year earlier.
The FTC is sponsoring a
three-day forum in Washington at the end of the month, bringing
together consumers, anti-spammers, Internet service providers,
law-enforcement officials and marketers to explore the spam problem
and discuss potential solutions.
FTC lawyers in Chicago are
scheduled to appear Tuesday before U.S. District Judge James Zagel
in an attempt to obtain a temporary restraining order to shut down
Westby's operation.
Consumers have sent more than 46,000
e-mail complaints about Westby to the FTC's unsolicited commercial
e-mail database at uce@ftc.gov in the last nine months, according to
the lawsuit.
The FTC database holds more than 36 million spam
messages and is used as a tool to help find possible targets for law
enforcement, officials said.
"We are one of the only
institutions that solicits spam," said Steven Wernikoff, an FTC
lawyer in Chicago who is handling the Westby litigation. "We
actually want to get it."
In Westby's case, unsuspecting
consumers who read the innocuous subject lines were surprised to
find images of naked women, the FTC said.
The e-mails went to
computers used by children and at people's workplaces, possibly
causing some employees to inadvertently violate work policies,
according to the FTC.
The e-mails had links to Westby's
"Married But Lonely" adult Web sites, which claimed to contain
information about married women looking for discreet affairs, the
suit said.
Among those caught off guard by the sexual content
of the e-mails was Marion Putnam, a retired minister who lives in
Tallahassee, Fla.
"It was sickening when I saw the crap they
put out," Putnam said Thursday.
Roger May, 48, an engineer
from suburban Houston, said he was concerned that his two teenage
children would be exposed to the sexually explicit
images.
"It did not give me any indication from the subject
that it was pornographic," May said. "If I had my wife or children
around, they would have seen these images without me ever knowing
it."
But the damage didn't end there, the FTC said. Innocent
third parties were listed as senders of the spam e-mail's on the
"from" and "reply to" lines.
Among the millions of spam
e-mails sent out by Westby, thousands were undeliverable, the FTC
said.
In those cases, the spam bounced back to those listed
on the "from" or "reply to" lines, overwhelming their computers and
resulting in angry messages from consumers thinking they were the
offending spammers, the lawsuit alleged.
Bill Hamel,
president of Ccis.net, an Internet service provider in Coatesville,
Pa., said the business was among Westby's victims.
Tens of
thousands of spam e-mails sent to non-existent addresses bounced
back to the company, slowing its server to a crawl and causing
customers to quit, Hamel said.
Hamel compared the problem to
receiving tens of thousands of letters on a single day from what
appeared to be a fun vacation spot only to discover nude photos
inside--and your home listed in the return address.
"We were
just getting flooded with it," Hamel said. "It comes to you from all
over the world."
Angry consumers, mistakenly thinking his
business had sent out the spam e-mails, called to complain, forcing
Hamel to repeatedly explain how he, too, was a victim.
"You
have to tell them the same story over and over again," Hamel
said.
Learn to stop junk e-mail at chicagotribune.com/spam.
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
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