US FTC closes, freezes assets of vast drug spam e-mail network

A US district court has ordered a halt to the operations of a vast international spam network that peddled prescription drugs and bogus male-enhancement products. This has been identified as the largest "spam gang" in the world by the anti-spam organization Spamhaus. The Federal Trade Commission has received more than three million complaints about spam messages connected to this operation, and estimates that it may be responsible for sending billions of illegal communications. At the request of the FTC, the court has issued a temporary injunction prohibiting defendants from spamming and making false product claims, and has frozen the defendants' assets to preserve them for consumer redress pending trial. Authorities in New Zealand have also taken legal action, working in tandem with the US agency.

According to papers filed with the court, the defendants deceptively marketed a variety of products through spam messages, including a male-enhancement pill, prescription drugs and a weight-loss agent.

One product called "VPXL" was advertised as "100% herbal and safe," and supposedly caused a permanent increase in the size of a user's penis. The agency alleged that, not only did the pills not work, but they were neither "100% herbal" nor "safe," because they contained sildenafil, the active ingredient in Pfizer's erectile dysfunction drug Viagra. At the FTC's request, the products were tested by the Food and Drug Administration. According to medical experts, men taking nitrate-containing drugs - which are commonly prescribed to treat diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol or heart disease - can experience an unsafe drop in their blood pressure when they also take sildenafil.