The group has been grossing more than $500,000 per month in Visa credit card sales alone, Wernikoff said.

New Zealand authorities are seeking US$121,000 (NZ$200,000) in fines each from the Atkinson brothers and Smits, claiming that they collectively sent more than two million e-mail messages to New Zealanders between September and December 2007 and earned more than US$2 million from spam during this four-month period.

Richard Cox, chief information officer with the antispam group Spamhaus, praised the FTC and the New Zealand government for targeting one of the with their actions.

But will the suits actually cut down on global spam? "We don't know," Cox said. "What we don't know is whether these guys will risk this happening again. The sort of fines they're going to get are going to be small change, relative to the profits they've made," he added.

"They can look at a $1 million fine as the cost of doing business."