Spam gang fined £10 million by US court

The network of spammers, led by New Zealand brothers Lance and Shane Atkinson, is believed to have been responsible for as much as one third of the world's web junk mail.

A US district court ordered the Atkinson brothers to pay £10 million for sending billions of unsolicited emails. The brothers had a network of operatives in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Russia and Canada who sent out messages advertising everything from penis enlargements to prescription drugs.

The spam operation has been at the centre of a lengthy investigation by the Federal Trade Commission in the United States. The Atkinson brothers sold products which they falsely claimed had come from a US-licensed pharmaceutical supplier, but after analysing pills sold by the spammers, the FTC discovered that many were shipped directly from India and had not been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

The commission also found that few of the products worked as advertised; penis-enhancement tablets that were said to be made from 100 per cent herbal ingredients were in fact not all-herbal, and did not work as claimed. Some tablets also contained traces of other drugs, which could have caused medical complications in people suffering from conditions such as high blood pressure or diabetes.

In 2008, a district court in Illinois ordered the Atkinson brothers to cease their spam operations, after the US authorities received more than three million complaints from web users. The brothers went to great lengths to throw investigators off the scent and disguise their role in the spam network. They operated under a variety of names, and bought dozens of web addresses and credit card services to avoid being caught.

Lance Atkinson, who has already paid around £35,000 in fines to the New Zealand authorities, will only have to pay his part of the £10 million fine if he sets foot on US soil. An accomplice, Jody Smith, has agreed to surrender the majority of his assets to the FTC. He also faces up to five years in jail after pleading guilty to conspiracy to traffic counterfeit goods.