INDICTED : Kiwis nail a Mr Big of the spam world
smh.com.au
December 22, 2008
A New Zealand man living in Australia has agreed to pay fines totalling $92,715 after admitting his role in an international spam email operation said to be responsible for sending out billions of unsolicited emails in recent years.
Lance Atkinson, 26, of Pelican Waters in Queensland, is also facing charges in the US where a court has frozen his assets at the request of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which also succeeded in having the spam network shut down.
New Zealand's Internal Affairs' Anti-Spam Compliance Unit found Lance Atkinson's operation responsible for more than 2 million unsolicited electronic messages that were sent to New Zealand computers between 5 September 2007 and 31 December 2007.
These emails marketed Herbal King, Elite Herbal and Express Herbal branded pharmaceutical products, manufactured and shipped by Tulip Lab of India.
The Department of Internal Affairs said in a statement released today that Atkinson had sought settlement of the New Zealand charges soon after the announced court proceedings against him in October.
Two other defendants, his brother Shane Atkinson, and Roland Smits, of Christchurch, are contesting the claim and have filed statements of defence.
In handing down her decision in a judgment on Friday, Justice Christine French of the High Court in Christchurch said that the spamming operation was said to be one of the largest in the history of the internet and its impact on New Zealand was therefore proportionately large.
The judge gave Lance Atkinson a substantial discount on the originally prescribed fine because of his co-operation and candour with authorities at an early stage.
Atkinson's Australian-registered company, Inet Ventures, is one of four companies targeted by the FTC over the operation, which encouraged people to click through to websites that allegedly used false claims to peddle prescription drugs, as well as "male enhancement" and weight-loss pills.
The only other defendant named by the FTC is Jody Smith of Texas.
The FTC said Atkinson and Smith allegedly controlled a "botnet" of 35,000 computers, capable of sending 10 billion email messages a day.
The non-profit antispam research group SpamHaus said the network - which has ties to Australia, New Zealand, India, China and the United States - was the largest spam operation in the world and at one point was responsible for one-third of all spam.
Atkinson and another business partner were previously fined $US2.2 million by the FTC in 2005 for running a similar spam network that marketed herbal products.
The FTC received more than 3 million complaints about the spam and related websites, illustrating the scale of the operation, officials said.
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