Kilbride

I. Background

A. Defendants’ Bulk Email Advertising Business

Defendants began their bulk email advertising business in 2003. They initially operated the business through an Ameri- can corporation, using servers in Arizona. In response to new legislation regulating email communication, the Defendants shifted the operation of their business overseas, running it through Ganymede Marketing (“Ganymede”), a Mauritian company, and using servers located in the Netherlands. Although Defendants used a business structure preventing a direct link to Ganymede, Defendants were its true owners and operators. If a recipient of Defendants’ emails signed on to the advertised website and paid a fee, Defendants earned a UNITED STATES v. KILBRIDE 14475 commission from the entity promoted. The advertisements appearing in Defendants’ emails included sexually explicit images, two of which formed the basis for the obscenity con- victions.

Defendants had their employees place fictitious information in the headers1 of their bulk emails. Defendants’ employee Jennifer Clason created nonsensical domain names and matched them with generic user names to generate a series of different…