NEWS: Man Accused of £1.5m Web Scams, page 1

A man accused of making over £1.5 million from web scams is on trial this week. Peter Francis-Macrae is accused to have tricked thousands of people to send him money thinking they were registering a .eu domain name. He is also accused to sending letters to people who's domain names were about to expire, demanding they send him a renewal fee. The scam apparently brought in over £200,000 per month, with the domain registration letters making up to £600,000. He is also charged with making threats to kill against a man and two woman. Being previously accused of being the UK's top spammer.

news.zdnet.co.uk
Francis-Macrae has previously been labelled the UK's top spammer. Spamhaus, a group that identifies junk emailers and helps ISPs to block their traffic, includes him on its list of professional spammers.

Francis-Macrae is also alleged to have sent a spam email in 2003 which told people they were about to be billed £399 unless they called a telephone number to cancel the order. The number belonged to Cambridgeshire Police, who had recently arrested Francis-Macrae, and the attack jammed the force's network.

Police also say that Francis-Macrae had threatened Nominet that he would launch a massive DoS attack against it.
In November 2003 Nominet, which runs the .uk registry, won an injunction against Macrae that prevents him from threatening Nominet's staff or using its whois database of .uk domain owners. Nominet had claimed he has been using the whois to send fraudulent re-registration letters to domain owners.

Please visit the link provided for the complete story.

Ouch! Forking out that kind of money to a scammed really must hurt. People need to be more efficient in making sure they are not paying for false goods or services. Until this happens people like Mr. Francis-Macrae will continue to prey upon them and scamming them of their money.

Related News Links:
news.zdnet.co.uk
www.theregister.co.uk
www.whois-search.com

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