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Gotcha! DNS Popup Scammer Fined $1.9 Million
Mister B writes: "A scam artist who trapped surfers mistyping their URLs (including those for children's websites) and barraged them with popup ads for pr0n and gambling has been busted to the tune of about $2 million. Apparently the FTC got ticked after having to close 64 separate browser windows! The FTC has a sense of humour nevertheless: the case name is 'Cupcake Party' (the scammer did business under 'Cupcake') :-) . More details at MSNBC and the FTC."
Or write something yourself, yeesh. There are solutions. Life is not a conspiracy theory.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Here are some of the scammed domains they are talking about
http://www.caroonnetwork.com
http://www.cartoo
http://www.artoonnetwork.com
http://
http://www.cartoonnetork.co
http://www.cartoonnetwrk.com
http://www.catoon
http://www.cartoonnetwok.com
[alk]
The first illegality is trademark infringement. The defendant, in many cases, used registered trademarks of companies in order to bombard people who attempted to visit a web site related to a product that they owned or were considering the purchase of. He had already lost 200 such sites through court cases.
The next illegality is the use of malicious code to bombard people with pop-up windows when they did things as innocuous as hit the back button. Many people were reduced to restarting their computer to escape from the mess that the defendant created. Exploiting a weakness in a computer, whether to spread a worm or pop up dozens of unwanted windows, is illegal.
It is illegal to display porn to children. That's why porn sites have an "I-am-over-18" button (so I am told). The defendant's web sites had no such protections.
Finally, "typosquatting" is illegal. The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act became law in November of 1999 and made it illegal for a person to register or use, with a "bad faith" intent to profit from, an Internet domain name that is "identical or confusingly similar" to the distinctive or famous trademark or Internet domain name of another person or company. No one should know that better than John Zuccarini, against whom the third district court upheld that law in a decision rendered in June of 2001.
On a side note, I spoke to John Zuccarini (the defendant) about a year ago. I tracked down his phone number after being pissed off about being hit by his scam when I typed in a URL in the form of "www.{product name}.com". I informed him that the URL contained a registered trademark. He was a rude asshole and I am just sorry that he's being fined rather than jailed.
I was browsing and tryed to downlaod a patch. And guess what ? My window suddenly resized down and all I saw was a casino ad...
After I re-enabled popup in opera Is aw what was happening : they loaded in the main window the ad, then make a popup resuming the old content of the mainwindow in a freaking pop up.
Clever. If it becomes mainstream you can forget anti popup software and opera special feature.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Funny thing is, this still happens. The guy got bagged, and still, I just tried typing in that URL, and sure enough, was still bombarded with porn. A f'ing kids site?!? Legal or not, that guy is a jerk. I hope HE doesn't have any kids.
And ironically, I probably just made him a half cent. But maybe I am eligable for returns on a class action suit!!
That's precisely the problem, people out there really do call Miss Cleo, buy "make my penis 25% larger" products etc... These schemes are nothing but looting of dumb people.
Just because there is no shortage of dumb people, I don't think we all have to resign ourselves to death by porn spam. Maybe this actually exists, but I'd like to see some online division at the FBI or FTC which aggressively goes after SPAM groups which don't honor remove requests, and scams designed just to take people's money. I'd really like to see Miss Cleo, fake human growth hormone pseudoscience, etc.... all put out of business. I wonder what percent of the American economy is just bs scams.
This may be an impossible problem, given it's global nature, but there is so much **** just in the US, there's plenty that could be done.
Now, please correct me if necessary, but I thought that the only way to infringe on a trademark, even a registered one, was to use that name, or something confusingly similar, to compete against me in the same trade domain. Unless I am in the porn industry, and have registered my trademark in that domain, I don't think my trademark is being infinged.
Similarly, you could create a new line of network switches called 'Matrix', and Toyota (or AOL-TW) couldn't do anything about it. You could create a new clear softdrink and call it 'Windows', and Microsoft couldn't dispute it. You could even register those words as trademarks. No infringement.
Perhaps, being the capitalist person I am, I would consider my best course of action to be to offer Mr. Zuccarini enough money to sell me cicadia.com. My solid belief in capitalist economic principles suggests to me that there must be some amount I could offer which would be more than he would expect to gain by keeping the domain to himself, and he would sell it to me.
Living better through chemicals
As a matter of fact, it IS A CRIME. Laws have been passed with very specifically make it illegal to do register domain names in bad faith and deceive users for commercial gain.
This particular criminal lost other cases and appeals and there was slashdot coverage (well, linking to real news sites, who themselves just rehash the AP wire). If you search, you'll find those articles and the linkage to the appeal court's findings of the specific law that was broken. (If I cared more about slash moderation, I'd go to the trouble to find the old article and links, but you can easily do this yourself)
The point is that there is a law against this specific actitivity. He broken it. It IS as crime. It's about time the FTC finally got around to persuing criminal charges (he's lost dozens of civil cases and knew very well he was breaking the law).
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools