Busted: Global Scam Marketing Fake Drugs
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) just busted a world-wide spam network responsible for burdening mailboxes with billions of illegal messages encouraging people to purchase unsafe male-enhancement and weight-loss pills.
The FTC froze the assets of two men, one from New Zealand and the other from Texas. Those assets may may go back to consumers who were sold the bogus weight-loss and male-enhancement drugs. [OK, time to insert bad, obvious joke: “I guess everything isn’t always bigger in Texas.”]
The FTC said it received more than 3 million complaints about the related spam. Preliminary estimates are that the spammers made millions of dollars off the bunk drugs.
The spam network used servers in China to host its Web sites and also used a “botnet” (a network of computers that are hijacked to send spam). In addition, it worked in Cyprus and Georgia to process the credit card information. Through this global system, more than 10 billion spam messages were sent each day.
The FTC is working with the FBI on possible criminal charges against the men.
Check out the related Total Lawyer’s article, Virginia Supreme Court Votes in Favor of Spam.
