You may remember reading about a major spam operation that involved emails being sent out attempting to defraud consumers by making them believe they had to register for specific health insurance. The messages claimed that because of the Affordable Health Care Act (aka Obamacare) people were required to sign up immediately or face fines or other penalties. When people clicked on the links in the messages they would be brought to third party insurance companies that had nothing to do with the ACA or any government programs.
Back in January, the FTC filed charges against the spammers because they were violating a number of anti-spam laws, including parts of the CAN-SPAM act. You can read more about these charges on the PMI post HERE.
After months of following the case, the FTC has finally reached a settlement with the spammers. The deal requires Yair Shalev through his company, Kobeni Inc, to pay $350,000 in fines. Shalev has not admitted or denied any guilt in the case.
Kobeni Inc is a well known spam organization that supposedly operates out of Hollywood, Florida. According to the Spamhaus Register of Known Spam Operations, Kobeni is the second largest spammer in the world. It is not clear how much of an impact this fine will have on preventing the company from sending spam messages out in the future.
In addition, there is no word on how the FTC came up with the amount of the fine. In the lawsuit they requested “restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten monies, and other equitable relief.”
Whatever the case, this appears to be the end of this case and will hopefully provide some level of discouragement for this and other spam companies from using people’s misunderstandings of the Affordable Care Act to attempt to defraud victims in the future.
