An Australian who "hijacked" Web pages, redirecting consumers to sexually explicit sites from which they could not escape, agreed to a court settlement to end the practice, US officials said today.
The US Federal Trade Commission said the agreement with Gregory Lasrado will halt the scheme that copied existing websites and inserted coded instructions in the copycat sites redirecting consumers to adult sites operated by him and his associates.
The FTC said that as a result of the agreement, a court injunction will be entered that will ban the defendants from operating the scheme.
The investigation was carried out in cooperation with consumer protection agencies in Australia and Portugal, the FTC said.
The FTC filed a complain in court in 1999 to halt the scheme called "pagejacking," in which the defendants made exact copies of Web pages posted by unrelated parties, including the imbedded text that informs search engines about the subject matter of the site.
They made one change that was hidden from view: inserting a command to "redirect" any surfer coming to the site to another website that contained sexually explicit material.
"Internet surfers searching for subjects as innocuous as 'Oklahoma tornadoes" or 'child car seats"' would end up being directed to the bogus porn sites, the FTC said.
Those sites also disabled the browser's "back" and "exit" commands "so that Internet surfers trying to escape the pornographic images faced screen after screen of similar material and advertisements for other adult sites," the agency said.
The FTC said as a result of the agreement, a federal court issued an injunction against two other defendants, WTFRC Pty Ltd. and Guiseppe Nirta.
A third defendant, Carlos Pereira, has evaded law enforcement authorities in Portugal, the FTC said.
AFP