In targeting students with e-mailed marketing campaigns the two brothers would make it appear that they had an association with the college or university that the student was attending in order to entice them into buying products and services. For instance, one of the campaigns involved a so-called textbook buyback program which made it appear that the institution the students were attending was participating in it.
On another occasion, the brothers allegedly set up a fictitious company called Custom Bright Inc. selling a teeth whitening product, which they portrayed as a alumni-owned business to the students they were targeting. The brothers often discussed methods on how to confuse people into subscribing or buying products from their Web sites.
In one IM exchange, a transcript of which is attached in the indictment, Osmaan talks about how 20 people signed up on one of the dozens of Web sites that the brothers typically created for each e-mail campaign. "They obviously looked at the site, and it is just funny ... we conned them," he says to his brother.
Many of the 31 spam e-mail campaigns the two brothers allegedly conducted were carried out on the networks of the University of Missouri where Osmaan Shah was a student, the indictment noted. Transcripts of chat messages between Osmaan and his brother show Osmaan apparently boasting about how he had easily gained access to the broadband networks at campus -- either wirelessly or by plugging his system directly into the network via an Ethernet connection.
In one of the messages, Osmaan talks about "blasting" 2 million e-mails an hour via the school's network. "Jease (sic) this is sick," he tells his brother. In another exchanges, he brags about repeatedly entering an unlocked class room in a campus building and using the broadband access there to send large volumes of spam to students at other campuses. "Last night I snuck into A&S ... was in a class room for like an hour and a half consuming the entire schools bandwidth ... sooooooo fast," he tells his brother.