Federal authorities say they managed to pierce the murky underworld of Internet spam e-mails, filing the first criminal charges under the government's new "can spam" legislation.
Court documents in the landmark case in Detroit describe a nearly inscrutable puzzle of corporate identities, bank accounts and electronic storefronts in one alleged spam operation.
At one point, investigators said, packages were sometimes delivered to a restaurant, where a greeter accepted them and passed them along to one defendant.
Officials at the Federal Trade Commission, who planned to announce the arrests in Washington on Thursday, told U.S. postal investigators they had received more than 10,000 complaints about unwanted e-mails sent by the defendants.
Court records identified the defendants as Daniel J. Lin, James J. Lin, Mark M. Sadek and Christopher Chung of West Bloomfield, Mich., near Detroit.
They were accused of disguising their identities in hundreds of thousands of sales pitches for fraudulent weight-loss products and delivering e-mails by bouncing messages through unprotected relay computers on the Internet.
I say "hang 'em high." I have spent hundreds of dollars and countless hours dealing with and trying to prevent spam. And my computer is now loaded up with so much anti-spam and anti-virus software that it runs painfully slowly. It's time for some of these people to be put to trial.
Details here from the AP via LexisOne.com.