The internet can be a wonderful and powerful learning tool that can open up one’s world to subjects and ideas that they might have never had access to otherwise – however, it can also be used for malicious attacks, crime, pornography, and of course, spam emails. Unsolicited, commercial emails spam filling up our inboxes every day is bad enough; but when these mass e-mails contain offensive images such as hardcore pornography you have a real big problem – especially when you consider the fact that there are some very young children that are using the internet and accessing their e-mail now on a daily basis.

The case of Jeffrey A. Kilbride and his associate, James R. Schaffer is a unique one, but it is a situation that was bound to present itself sooner than later on the World Wide Web. And sure enough, in June of 2007 the pair was convicted on 8 counts including conspiracy, fraud, money laundering, and transportation of obscene materials – all of which came to light because of their pornographic-spamming campaign.

As a result of their conviction, these two spammers were ordered to pay $100,000 in fines, more than $75,000 in restitution to America Online, and forced to forfeit the entire profit gained from their spamming campaign; a total of more than $1 million. In addition to these financial penalties, Jeffrey Kilbride was sentenced to six years in prison and his partner, James Schaffer will serve a total of 63 months behind bars. Their trial was the first to take place under the revisions of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 which were specifically aimed at reducing the amount of pornography found in online spam.