Two Missouri brothers who pounded U.S. college students with unwanted commercial e-mails pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to conspiracy to distribute spam.
Amir Ahmad Shah, 29, and Osmaan Ahmad Shah, 26, both of Manchester, Mo., each acknowledged using the University of Missouri computer network to send the spam.
When prosecutors initially charged the brothers in April 2009, they alleged that the conspiracy had sent millions of unwanted messages to students at U.S. colleges and universities. The guilty plea Wednesday was more narrowly drawn, focusing on a single campaign offering digital cameras from December 2004 to February 2005.
The brothers also admitted using computer software to harvest more than 8 million e-mail addresses for students at the University of Missouri and hundreds of other U.S. colleges and universities.
The brothers and their company, i2o, Inc., also agreed to forfeit almost $440,000 in assets that investigators had traced to their scheme. Those included four bank accounts with deposits totaling $78,980.60, homes in Columbia and St. Louis worth $344,250, two luxury automobiles worth $16,590 and five Internet domain names.
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