FBI Shuts Down Unauthorized McCain Website

By Sushuma February 20, 2000 12:49 PM

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(MSNBC)-The FBI Friday shut down a Web site collecting political contributions for presidential candidate Senator John McCain hours after MSNBC began making inquires into its legal status.?The site, run by MediaKing International, a California based Internet services firm, had exactly copied McCain?s online campaign contribution Web page and hosted it on its own servers, without permission and with no official affiliation to the McCain campaign.?Unwitting McCain supporters going to the unauthorized site had no idea they weren?t directly donating to the McCain campaign.?Like the official McCain site, the unauthorized site collected donations via credit card.?The Federal Trade Commission has dubbed such practices ?page jacking? and has already pursued one huge case in which millions of unsuspecting Web surfers were redirected to porn sites as a result of being snagged in the page-jacking scam.?The unauthorized McCain scheme was more nefarious because it was directly taking money from consumers; the previous page-jacking scheme only stole traffic from the rightful sites, robbing them of all important ?eyeballs,? which are used by Web sites to set advertising rates.?A Federal Election Commission official said the scheme would fall under federal election campaign laws only if the MediaKing operators were in some way affiliated with another campaign or if it were found out that the site was being run by a member of McCain?s own campaign to siphon off money for personal use.?In other cases the Department of Justice has prosecuted people under the wire fraud laws for running unauthorized sites that collect money under fraudulent pretences.?Read more...

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