FTC Halts Large Diet Pill Scam Spammers

There is some good news about all those spam email messages hawking diet pills.  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued a restraining order against a group of scammers it believes to be responsible for sending out massive amounts of them over the years.

The group, being nicknamed the "Com Spammers" have been accused of using phony news sites, spam email, fake claims of weight loss, and phony celebrity endorsements to sell diet supplements that have not been proven effective; all the FTC claims violates the FTC Act and the CAN-SPAM Act. The complaint is against Sale Slash in Glendale, California and halts any allegedly illegal activities as well as freezes its assets.

It turns out that those responsible for this scam have been operating out of the United States, which put them within the jurisdiction of the FTC. A message filtering firm, Cloudmark, provided the agency with information it had collected on the Com Spammers and found that spammers were being paid by owners of various landing pages when traffic was directed toward them. The site owners were paid by the various scammers.

All of this ultimately is a form of phishing and it's likely many reading this have received an email message from this group or one very much like it. It's important to recognize phishing attempts wand delete the messages rather than forward them on or click on links or attachments contained within them.  Often, the links don't merely take you to a harmless site pushing some phony product, but they also may go through your email contact list and send spam to all your contacts, and possibly even install malware on your system that steals login credentials to financial websites.

In this case, the FTC alleges it knows who is responsible for monetizing the diet pills as well as who is managing the group of spammers.  This is what allowed the agency to obtain the injunctions.