FREE PORN!!! FREE PORN!!! FREE PORN!!!

Yeah. That’s how they get you, isn’t it? The spammers… they suck you in with these headlines like “Free Porn!”, “Free Viagra”, “Free Men’s Enhancements” and more. They litter our inboxes with this crap and put banner ads in places they don’t even belong. Well, I’m pleased to tell you that one of the biggest spammers in the universe was shut down yesterday.

The iEEE Spectrum most accurately reported:

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was able to persuade a federal court in Chicago to freeze the assets and order the shut down of HerbalKing, reputed to be one of the largest spam e-mailers, for violating the Can-Spam Act of 2003, the New York Times reports this week.

The Times story reported that SpamHaus, a nonprofit antispam research group, estimated that HerbalKing was responsible for sending out one-third of all spam at one point, which included everything from replica watches to (naturally) herbal pills.

The FTC said that HerbalKing was able to send out billions of spam e-mails through the use of botnets. One botnet was made up of 35,000 computers and was able to send 10 billion e-mail messages a day.

The story quotes a senior technology consultant at Sophos, a spam-fighting security firm as saying, “It wouldn’t be a surprise if people don’t notice any difference in their in-box tomorrow morning.”

But the Times of London wrote a much spicier version… even if they did get the facts off a bit:

Authorities in the US and New Zealand have frozen the assets of Lance Atkinson and Jody Smith, of the HerbalKing group, and taken out restraining orders preventing them from continuing business.

They are accused of bombarding internet users with emails about penis enlargement, prescription drugs and weight loss through a network capable of sending 10 billion messages a day – or 115,741 every second.

Mr Atkinson, of New Zealand, and Mr Smith, of Texas, are accused of making millions of dollars through the HerbalKing ring, which the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says stretched from America to China, via Canada, Australia, India and Russia.

To send the emails, the gang is believed to have used an army of zombie computers – a “botnet” – comprising 35,000 systems belonging to unsuspecting surfers whose machines had been hacked.

Action was taken against the pair under the US’s Can-Spam Act, which outlawed the practice of sending large volumes of unsolicited emails. The law requires senders to provide a postal address and provide a means through which recipients can opt-out of further messages.

The FTC also accused the pair of selling medication which was bogus or for which they had no licence. Mr Atkinson was fined $2.2 million (£1.28 million) three years ago for pushing herbal remedies in a similar way.

All I have to say is, if they would bring back the public hangings I think we could really cut down on the spam problem.