Spoofers Who Have Been Brought to Book
2000: JASON Garon pleads guilty to a charge of forgery in a New York court, in the first Internet forgery prosecution in the United States. Garon sent spam advertising pornography and get-rich-quick schemes, disguised to appear as if sent by IBM’s Internet provider, IBM.net. The maximum prison sentence for second-degree forgery is seven years.
2003: Amazon.com files federal suits against 11 spoof emailers from the United States and Canada, seeking millions of dollars in punitive damages. The emails, which were disguised as coming from Amazon.com, promoted, among others, enlargement pills and home appliances.
2003: Oleg Zezov, a computer technician from Kazakhstan, was convicted by a US jury for trying to extort US$200,000 (RM680,000) from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg by threatening to reveal how he and another person, Igor Yarimaka, had hacked into the computer systems of Bloomberg LP, the financial information company Bloomberg founded.
Zezov was found guilty of conspiracy, attempted extortion, sending threatening electronic messages and computer intrusion.
He received a four-year sentence out of a possible maximum 20 years. This was alleged to be one of the longest terms ever given for computer intrusion.
Although arrested in London, England, Zezov and Yarimaka were extradited to the United States when the English High Court ruled that the falsification of sender details in feeding information into Bloomberg’s systems amounted to a breach of the UK’s Computer Misuse Act.
Judges found that when a person caused a computer “to record that information came from A when it in fact came from B, that manifestly affected the reliability of that information”.
In the act, a hacking offence is committed when “unauthorised modifications” are made to a computer with intent and knowledge. Intent exists when the modifications impaired the operation of a computer, hindered access to a program or data, or impaired the operation of a program or “the reliability of any such data”.
2004: Criminal prosecutions were brought against Christopher Chung and Mark Sadek in the United States for sending unsolicited emails advertising bogus diet patches. The spammers had also tried to hide their identities by using innocent third-party email addresses.
2004: Australian company Global Web Promotions Pty Ltd is charged by the US Federal Trade Commission for sending massive amounts of spam in the United States. The company also spoofed its e-mails in an attempt to hide its tracks.
Jeffrey Collins, attorney for the eastern district of Michigan said: “The cyber scam artists who exploit the Internet for commercial gain should take notice. Federal law now makes it a felony to use falsehood and deception to hide the origin of the spam messages hawking your fraudulent wares.”
Source: www.out-law.com (IT and e-commerce legal help from international law firm Pinsent Masons)
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