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Feds Bust One of World's Largest Spammers

Posted Oct 14, 08 1:31 PM CDT in Technology,  Crime & Courts 

(Newser) – Thank the feds if you find fewer offers for Viagra in your inbox today. The FTC says it shut down one of the world's largest spam operations, which promoted the sale of prescription drugs and male enhancement pills by way of billions of illegal email messages, the Chicago Tribune reports.

The FTC received more than 3 million complaints about this particular network, which relied on servers in China and used a botnet to hijack tens of thousands of computers to send the spam. A court froze the assets of two men in New Zealand and Texas; officials estimate the spammers made millions of dollars from the sale of the advertised drugs, which came from China and India.

Sources Chicago Tribune, Associated Press

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The Federal Trade Commission worked with its counterparts in New Zealand to crack the international ring of spammers.   (Getty Images)
The spam group was one of the world's largest, sending up to 10 billion e-mails a day from hijacked computers.   (Getty Images)
The spammers sold unsafe weight loss and male enhancement drugs from China and India.   (Getty Images)
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