Fergie's Tech Blog

Two Brothers Among Indictees in $4M Spam Case

Jaikumar Vijayan writes on ComputerWorld:

Two Missouri men who made over $4 million pitching and selling everything from electronics to teeth whiteners to students in more than 2000 colleges and universities have been indicted by a federal grand jury on a variety of e-mail spamming and related charges.

Amir Ahmad Shah, 28, of St. Louis, and his brother, Osmaan Ahmad Shah, 25, of Columbia, Mo., were charged in a 51-count sealed indictment by a federal grand jury on April 23. Also indicted in the nationwide spamming case were Liu Guan Ming, a Chinese citizen, Paul Zucker, a 55-year-old from Wayne N.J, and I20 Inc., the company owned by the Shah brothers.

According to the indictment papers, the spam e-mail scheme affected virtually every college and university in the country. It began around 2001 with the Shah brothers allegedly using e-mail extracting programs to harvest e-mail addresses from colleges and universities around the country which they then used to send targeted spam e-mails pitching various products.

posted by Fergie @ 5/01/2009 05:42:00 PM