MU student, alumnus indicted in e-mail scam

Osmaan and Amir Shah earned more than $4.1 million since 2001.

By Juana Summers

Published April 30, 2009

An MU graduate student is among the people indicted by a grand jury in conjunction with a national e-mail scam that targeted more than 2,000 colleges and universities since 2004.

Osmaan A. Shah, 25, of Columbia, and Amir A. Shah, 28, of St. Louis were two of the four people named in the 51-count indictment. The Shah brothers were arrested yesterday.

Osmaan Shah, a graduate student studying business administration, received his bachelor's degree in business in 2006. Amir Shah is a former MU student. He graduated with a computer science degree in 2003.

The indictment states the Shahs developed e-mail-extraction programs used to harvest e-mail addresses from MU students and students at more than 2,000 other colleges and universities nationwide.

They unlawfully collected 8 million e-mail addresses, the indictment stated.

According to the indictment, the defendants used the e-mail addresses they gathered to send targeted spam e-mails selling "various products and services targeted at students."

The indictment stated the Shahs earned more than $4.1 million by buying bulk products and selling them or through a referral fee for sending spam e-mails for other groups.

They also used the obtained e-mail addresses to solicit subscriptions to their social networking Web site, Noog.com. At time of press, the Web site stated "Noog.com is currently under maintenance."

Also named in the indictment were Liu Guang Ming, a Chinese citizen, and Paul F. Zucker of Wayne, Ind. The Shah brothers' joint business, I2O Inc., located in Columbia, was also named in the indictment.

Initial e-mail scams committed by the Shah brothers began as early as 2001, according to the indictment. The Shahs connected with Ming, in China, through online instant message conversations.

Criminal investigation into the e-mail scam began in 2005. MU officials identified the scam so they stopped targeting students from the UM system and instead focused on other campuses, the indictment stated.

Osmaan Shah, the MU student involved with the scam, was in charge of "computer related tasks" in this conspiracy, according to the indictment.

The indictment states that in seven e-mail spam campaigns messages were sent from MU's campus. According to chat transcripts part of the indictment, they "blasted" from vacant classrooms in the Arts and Science Building. Messages were also sent from Cornell Hall, which houses the Trulaske College of Business.

Security officials went to Cornell Hall after pinpointing the source of the Shah's scam e-mails, which were run through the MU network, and found Shah in the building on his computer.

MU spokesman Christian Basi said he couldn't say how many MU students were affected in the e-mail scam.

Basi said as a result of the investigation, new software was implemented as a security measure and that other actions were taken.

He could not comment on whether disciplinary action was taken against the Shah brothers due to privacy issues.

"There was no personal identification information that was taken," Basi said. "This was simply a case of spamming. It was not a case of identity theft."

According to a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice, the university expended a "substantial amount of time, money and resources" to repair problems caused by the spam e-mail campaigns.

A detention hearing for the Shah brothers will be held Monday in Kansas City.