N.Y. Man Arrested Over Instant-Message Spam

Now spammers have gone beyond e-mail and are attacking instant-message services popular with teenagers, authorities said Friday as they announced the arrest of a young man suspected of broadcasting 1.5 million ads for pornography and cheap mortgages.

Federal prosecutors said it was the first criminal case involving this new form of spam -- known as "spim" because it targets so-called IM services.

"It's absolutely unsurprising that spammers would find a new way to spread their slime through any crack and crevice available," said Anne Mitchell, president of the private Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy.

Anthony Greco, 18, was arrested Wednesday at Los Angeles International Airport, where prosecutors said they lured him from his upstate New York home for what he expected would be a meeting with the president of MySpace.com, a popular social-networking company whose users Greco allegedly spammed.

Greco had threatened to tell other spammers how he sent the unsolicited instant messages to MySpace users last fall if he wasn't given an exclusive marketing contract with the company, according to a sworn investigator's statement filed in Los Angeles federal court.

Los Angeles-based MySpace is similar to Friendster and other Web firms that connect people with shared interests or mutual friends. The service claims 9 million users and is popular with teenagers, investigators said.

MySpace spokesman Bennet Ratcliff explained that the company's messaging system is technologically more like regular e-mail than instant messaging, and users must click on a message to see its full content. The company's network has no serious spam problem, he said, and is "continuously adding deterrents to protect our users."

Nevertheless, news of Greco's arrest is "alarming," said Lawrence Orans, a Gartner Inc. analyst who follows computer security issues and this week warned companies to increase instant messaging safeguards. "He could have directed people to sites that spread spyware or other malicious code."

America Online, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. all offer instant messaging programs, in which words typed by a sender immediately appear on recipients' screens. The rapid adoption of such programs has been followed by a rise in spam and computer viruses that spread through them.

Just last week, Microsoft required users of its messaging service to install upgraded software to fix a security flaw.