Man sued by FTC for breaching CAN-SPAM Act

Posted on Monday, August 02,
2004 at 23:55 by Rich Kavanagh

The Federal
Trade Commission (FTC) have won a court order against Mr Creaghan Harry who
lives in Florida.

The court order prevents Mr Creaghan Harry from sending illegal email spam and
marketing false product claims by trying to sell bogus "human growth
hormone" products over the Internet.

According to the FTC, between
1 January and 31 May 2004 consumers forwarded over 40,000 complaints concerning
spam messages linked to Mr Harry. The court order has frozen Mr Harry's
financial assets and ordered him to halt marketing any more of his products via
email.

The illegal spam messages are said to contain links to web sites that market Mr
Harry's "Supreme Formula HGH" and "Youthful Vigor
HGH" products, which claim to stop or reverse the ageing process,
encouraging muscle gain, weight loss, wrinkle removal, muscle gain, hair
growth, and higher levels of energy.

Mr Harry was charging $79.95 for one month's supply of the products.

The FTC say that the
product's claims are entirely false, and that the products have no discernible
positive effect on the human body.

Mr Harry is said to have used a variety of techniques to hide his involvement
with the product selling, including using anonymous web sites, spam, and having
proceeds from sales deposited in a Latvian bank account. He is accused of
disguising the source of spam messages by sending them through innocent third
party computers without their owners' knowledge or permission. On some
occasions, it is said, the source of the e-mails was disguised by forging
addresses in the "reply-to" and "from" fields to spoof the
real sender's identity in an attempt to avoid detection by anti-spam products.

The FTC's complaint charges
that the email messages violated the CAN-SPAM Act by disguising their source and failing to
provide a method of opting-out from future emails.

Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant for Sophos said,

"Computer users worldwide are fed up with the daily drudge of wading
through unwanted spam to get to their legitimate email. It's encouraging to see
the US authorities investigate complaints of users who have been bombarded with
spam - but more needs to be done to catch all of those behind this Internet
nuisance. All businesses should protect themselves now to prevent spam clogging
up their email InBoxes."

More information on the case is available
on the FTC website.