Porn Can-Spam Conviction Upheld

A federal court has upheld what is believed to be the first conviction that included charges under the federal Can Spam Act.

Judge David Campbell for the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona on Aug. 24 denied the requests of Jeffrey A. Kilbride, Venice, CA and James R. Schaffer, Paradise Valley, AZ for either an acquittal or a new trial.

The two were convicted by a jury on June 25 on eight criminal counts, including money laundering, fraud and obscenity connected with spamming.

Included in the convictions were two violations of the Can Spam Act, one for sending messages with false return address information, and one for using domain names that had been registered using false information.

When Can Spam went into effect on Jan. l, 2004, the two took steps to avoid it by arranging to log into servers in Amsterdam to make it look like their messages were being sent from overseas, prosecutors said.

They hired computer network specialist Andrew Ellifson to set up the servers in Amsterdam, according to court papers. They then hired Christopher Compston, a citizen of the Isle of Man to help them move their business offshore, the papers said.

The papers also said Compston helped Kilbride and Schaffer set up a front company called Ganymede Marketing in Mauritius, an island nation off the coast of Africa.

They also hired computer programmer Kirk Rogers who for $2,000 a week designed a software program that would automatically spam the operation’s e-mail database that at one point reached 43 million addresses, court papers said. He also designed a feature that would send pornographic e-mails every 30 days to addresses of people who asked to be removed from Ganymede’s list, papers said.

Schaffer also hired Jennifer Clason to run the spamming operation from his house, starting in 1999 for $2,500 per month and eventually for $9,000 a month, court papers said. Clason spent a significant portion of her time creating domain names and subject lines, according to court documents.

Kilbride and Schaffer made $1.4 million from spamming in 2003, court papers said.

Also, between December 2003 and June 2004, AOL reportedly received more than 660,000 complaints from people who said they received pornographic spam from the defendants, court papers said.

Ellifson, Rogers and Clason pleaded guilty to the Can Spam charges.

In August 2006, Clason posted a long confession on a Web site she runs, MommyJobs.com, in which she claimed she didn’t know what she was doing while working for Schaffer was illegal.

“It was bad enough that I was doing ‘immoral’ things such as working on his adult sites,” she said in the post. “However he managed to convince me that it wasn’t illegal.”

At some point, Clason said, she became fed up and moved to New Hampshire.

“I made a promise to God. I told him that I would stop working with the adult themed material as long as he helped me become a success with my non-adult sites (mommyjobs.com and my other sites),” she wrote.

She also confessed that she was not a mother as she purported herself to be on MommyJobs.

“I was stupid and wrong,” she wrote. “I just wanted to create a sites for work at home mothers and thought I needed to be knowledgeable about being a mother to do so. In fact, all I need to know about is working at home! And I know everything about that.”

Clason is currently listed in the WhoIs contact information for PhatBucks.com, a site that pays affiliates for each person they get to subscribe to pornographic Web sites such as “Large Females,” “Broadband Blowjobs,” and “Foot Kink.”

Kilbride and Schaffer face five years in prison for each Can Spam violation and obscenity offense, a fine of up to $500,000 and up to 20 years for money laundering, prosecutors said.

Sentencing is set for Sept. 24.