Man Arrested Over Instant-Message Spam

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-spim19feb19,0,5675078.story

By Joseph Menn, Times Staff Writer

Flooding the inbox is no longer enough.

Now spammers have gone beyond e-mail and are attacking instant-message services popular with teenagers, authorities said Friday as they announced the arrest of a young man suspected of broadcasting 1.5 million ads for pornography and cheap mortgages.

Federal prosecutors said it was the first criminal case involving this new form of spam — known as "spim" because it targets so-called IM services.

"It's absolutely unsurprising that spammers would find a new way to spread their slime through any crack and crevice available," said Anne Mitchell, president of the private Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy.

Anthony Greco, 18, was arrested Wednesday at Los Angeles International Airport, where prosecutors said they lured him from his upstate New York home for what he expected would be a meeting with the president of MySpace.com, a popular social-networking company whose users Greco allegedly spammed.

Greco had threatened to tell other spammers how he sent the unsolicited instant messages to MySpace users last fall if he wasn't given an exclusive marketing contract with the company, according to a sworn investigator's statement filed in Los Angeles federal court.

Remember kids: extortion is still extortion whether you do it in person or online. Don't think that you're any safer because you're sitting behind a computer keyboard. I hope they throw the book at this guy.