Prosecutors say his method was to stake claim to domain names that slightly misspelled Web addresses popular with children.
By Associated Press
Published September 4, 2003
NEW YORK - Federal agents on Wednesday arrested a Hollywood, Fla., man who authorities said runs Web sites that use misspelled addresses to direct children looking for Disneyland or the Teletubbies to graphic sex instead.
Officials said it is the first prosecution under a provision of a new national Amber Alert law that makes it a crime to use a misleading Web address to entice children to pornography.
John Zuccarini, 53, was arrested at a Hollywood motel, where authorities think he had been living for months, Manhattan U.S. Attorney James Comey said.
Zuccarini registered thousands of Internet domain names and was earning up to $1-million a year off them - much of it from sex sites that paid him when he sent Web users their way, Comey said.
Officials say Zuccarini used addresses that switched or omitted letters of Web sites generally of interest to children. A Web user who misspelled a site address might end up at a porn site instead.
Zuccarini used the technique to trap Web surfers trying to reach sites for pop star Britney Spears, Disneyland and Teletubbies children's characters, among others, according to the criminal complaint.
Once there, Web users often encountered a maze of popup advertising called "mousetrapping," which sends up even more ads when surfers click the "back" button on browsers or try to close the windows altogether.
Prosecutor Comey referred to the scheme as a "cybermaze." He called it "beyond offensive" to prey on children - many of them looking for sites acceptable to their parents - who make a simple spelling mistake on a browser.
"Few of us could imagine there was someone out there in cyberspace, essentially reaching out by hand to take children to the seediest corners of the Internet," he told reporters.
Prosecutors in Fort Lauderdale were expected to ask a federal judge to order Zuccarini held and sent to New York for prosecution.
Authorities said Zuccarini is originally from Philadelphia.
Federal agents were investigating him as early as 1999, when they received a complaint from a computer user who was looking for Yahoo!'s travel site but found porn instead.
Last year the Federal Trade Commission sued Zuccarini for registering misspelled variations of sites for the Backstreet Boys, Victoria's Secret and the Wall Street Journal. Companies targeted by his Web sites have filed dozens of complaints with regulators and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the body that doles out Internet addresses.
The FTC said Zuccarini has lost 53 state and federal lawsuits and about 200 Web addresses have been taken from him and transferred to copyright holders.
Authorities believe other people are conducting similar schemes, but not on such a large scale.
Still, federal authorities conceded they were mostly helpless to prosecute Zuccarini until Congress passed the Amber Alert legislation in April.
A section of the law makes it a crime to use a misleading domain name "with the intent to deceive a minor into viewing material that is harmful to minors." Punishment is up to four years in prison.
Zuccarini's sites sometimes sent up a warning screen urging minors to exit but offering an "Enter here" button, authorities said. The button led to sites depicting graphic sex.
"We cannot imagine a better way for this law to be used for the first time," Comey said.
