Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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