“Spammers beware! We are on the side of parents and kids to protect their ability to filter out sexually-explicit e-mails.” That’s the somewhat bureaucratic rallying cry of the US Federal Trade Commission’s Lydia Parnes. You can forgive Lydia for her giddiness.

Her team just tagged a network with using spam to sell access to online pornography, claiming they shattered the Adult Labeling Rule, the CAN-SPAM Act, and the FTC Act.

The feds say the alleged perps spewed porn and pornish spams sans prior consent, the “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:” warning in the subject line, or identifying messages as ads. In addition, the FTC says the crew faked message headers and subject lines, and claimed services were free (they’re not). Oh. And no opt-out notice or valid mailing address.

Finally, the FTC claims the defendants,

  • acted as a single business enterprise;
  • controlled the site owners, operators, payment systems, and servers;and
  • also peddled porn via commission-paying affiliate programs.

The Defendants: Global Net Solutions (Las Vegas); Global Net Ventures, Ltd. (London); Wedlake, Ltd. (allegedly of Riga, Latvia); Open Space Enterprises, Inc. (Las Vegas); Southlake Group, Inc. (Las Vegas); WTFRC, Inc. doing business as Reflected Networks, Inc. (Las Vegas); Dustin Hamilton; Tobin Banks; Gregory Hamilton; Philip Doroff; and Paul Rose.

That’s Las Vegas, London, Latvia, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Las Vegas.

The FTC vote to file was unanimous. A federal district judge agreed, freezing ops and assets till the preliminary hearing.

So what does an apparent porn ring have to do with responsible businesses that don’t even sell by email? Affiliate marketing. CAN-SPAM says, “recipients of commercial electronic mail have a right to decline to receive additional commercial electronic mail from the same source.”

Here’s the rub. Marketing Sherpa observes: “The opt-out is for any promotional mail your brand might ever send that email address from any list or staffer ever again.”

The FTC appears to have concluded that you are responsible for everyone who sells your product. Just wait till Intel, Microsoft and Kodak find out. Somebody’s headed for the woodshed.