Brian McDaid was a chiropractor who ran an affiliate spam scheme in 2005-2006 for Hoodia and other weight loss nostrums. He called his company Sili Neutraceuticals.
In 2007, the FTC charged that he falsely advertised that Hoodia caused rapid weight loss. In 2008, they got a $2 million judgement against him and confiscated all of his assets.
But not only was the stuff he was selling bogus, he was using affiliates he found on the Bulkbarn web site to advertise, and to nobody's surprise (except, perhaps, his) the affiliates spammed like crazy. To accept the orders from the affiliates he registered large numbers of domain names for web sites hosted on bullet-proof servers overseas. He was indicted by a Philadelphia grand jury on criminal CAN SPAM charges in March 2011, and subsequently pled guilty.
On May 1, McDaid was sentenced in Philadelphia Federal Court. Judge Dalzell found that even though there was little chance of McDaid resuming his spamming career, due to the seriousness of his crimes, he was sentenced to two years in prison. CAUCE president John Levine testified for the government at the hearing, explaining that spamming, particularly on the large scale that McDaid did, placed huge unneccesary costs on the recipients and their mail providers.
For a first person report from the hearing, see http://jl.ly/Email/mcdaid.html
