A Missouri grand jury has indicted 4 men, including a pair of brothers, for their roles in a huge spam operation which targeted over 2,000 colleges. Authorities say Amir Ahmad Shah and his brother Osmaan created a program that harvested over 8 million student addresses from those colleges. Those addresses were then sent thousands of spams hawking such things as digital cameras and spring break specials. In order to gain the students’ trust, the brothers claimed to be campus representatives and that the businesses were alumni-owned, both of which were untrue

          “Nearly every college and university in the United States was impacted by this scheme,” Matt Whitworth, acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri, said in a statement. “Illegal hacking and e-mail spamming wreaks havoc on computer networks. These schools spent significant funds to repair the damage and to implement costly preventive measures to defend themselves against future intrusions.”

The operation allegedly netted over $4.1 million. The Shah’s and their company face 26 charges of aiding and abetting each other to access a protected computer without authorization and transmit commercial emails with the intent to deceive or mislead the recipients about the origin of the messages, as well as with conspiracy to engage in an unlawful spam operation and multiple charges of fraud using computers and email. They face a minimum of 10 years in jail as well as stiff fines.

Spam comes in all shapes and sizes. Besides the traditional email spam, spammers target forums, blogs, and now, for the first time I’ve seen them targeting Web 2.0 B2B sites with a variation of the old Nigerian 419 scam, this one involving advanced fee fraud. Small businesses and one-man shops should take note and beware of this activity.

The miracle of the Internet has made it possible for me to work at home exclusively, running my small one-man shop from my home office whilst wearing a bathrobe and slippers. And the wonderful thing about it is that there are many more people like myself out there, who do the same thing. One of the marvelous Web 2.0 inventions that enables me to continue putting my name out there is B2B networking sites, which connect businesses looking for contractors for projects, and the contractors who provide them. As a writer, consultant and analyst, I make good use of these B2B sites and have often gotten great projects from them. But scammers too are seeing these Web 2.0 sites as a new target to find their victims.

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