FTC Shuts Down Spam Ring

The FTC won a legal victory against what it considers as one of the largest spam gangs on the Internet. A federal court in Chicago agreed to freeze the assets of the notorious spam gang known as HerbalKing and shut them down. HerbalKing has sent billions of spam messages to Internet users promoting everything from fake watches to fake prescription drugs. The injunction was granted after FTC officials argued that the group was in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.   

          “This is pretty major. At one point these guys delivered up to one-third of all spam,” said Richard Cox, chief information officer at SpamHaus, a nonprofit antispam research group.

HerbalKing controlled the Mega-D botnet, which was made up of over 30,000 computers and sent 10 billion spams a day. The group’s operations were quite profitable – the FTC says they made over $400,000 a month. In an obvious attempt to cloak their operations, their websites were based in China and they processed credit cards in the former Soviet country of Georgia and Cyprus, and shipped their black market and fake drugs from India. Officials who purchased their much hyped herbal pills found they contained the active ingredient in Viagra, but unlike that drug, their pill offered no warnings that it could be harmful to people with heart conditions.

While the FTC and security experts are hoping the shutdown of HerbalKing sends a strong message to other spammers, they aren’t expecting it to have too much of an impact on spam levels, explaining that in the spam world, there’s always a new kid on the block ready to take over.