Federal regulators crack down on porn spammers

Federal regulators have accused seven companies which charges of hiring other companies and individuals to send SPAM mails with illicit messages to lure them into visiting pornographic websites and pages. Impressively, four of these companies have already agreed to pay nearly $1.2 million to settle the charges. This just might be the most aggressive step taken by the government against porn spam mail network.

The Federal Trade Commission even called the practice of sending pornographic mails to ignorant users similar to “electronic flashing” and focused on the fact that some of these mails would have been delivered to children’s mail ids. This had already resulted in government putting on strict restrictions on sending commercial e-mails last year.

One of the reasons behind the steps taken by the government is that most of these mails do not carry adequate instructions to get out of the mailing lists of spammers. Other than that, most mails are designed smart enough to bypass most filters setup by the mail clients and mailing services. Federal law also requires the companies to put in their postal addresses on these mails.

Most of the targeted companies used affiliate programs to target their victims. The regulators claimed that even these companies are liable to be punished under the law as they paid others to send e-mails on their behalf.