Three defendants in an international porn spam case were indicted...

Act and criminal conspiracy, the Justice Dept. said. Kilbride and Schaffer also face charges of interstate transportation of obscene material and money laundering; Schaffer is accused of operating adult websites without keeping records of performers on those sites. AOL received more than 600,000 complaints Jan.-June 2004 about porn spam attributed to the defendants, and Spamhaus identified the operation as one of the world’s 200 largest, DoJ said. The indictment said the defendants advertised porn sites in e-mail messages -- with graphic embedded images -- to earn commissions on traffic sent to those sites. DoJ said the spam was sent from IP addresses registered in the Netherlands and domain names registered in Mauritius, with the “From” line in messages falsified; the computers were based in the Netherlands but controlled from the U.S., the indictment alleges. Kilbride and Schaffer were said to have used bank accounts in the Isle of Man and Mauritius to launder and distribute money raised from the e-mail messages. The defendants face varying sentences if convicted, up to: (1) 20 years in prison for money laundering. (2) 5 years each for obscenity, CAN-SPAM violation and criminal conspiracy. (3) 2 years for improper recording keeping. An earlier defendant who pleaded guilty, Andrew Ellifson, was the first to be convicted on charges of sending porn spam. Ellifson agreed to forfeit money received for helping run the computer network, an unsealed plea agreement shows. He faces up to 5 years in prison for each charge of spamming and criminal conspiracy, and is scheduled for sentencing Sept. 26. The Family Research Council, a strong supporter of antipornography initiatives at DoJ, praised the indictments and conviction. “Until now, Internet pornographers have been given carte blanche to do as they please,” Senior Legal Counsel Patrick Trueman said in a statement. “But a new day is dawning at the Department of Justice.”