A U.S. Department of Justice official told a reporter that the Direct Marketing Association's (DMA's) PR campaign to take partial credit for U.S. anti-fraud efforts crossed over the line from mere self-promotion and moved into harmful interference last week. The New York Times published a story last Wednesday in which former DMA head Robert Weintzen crowed that the group's "Slam Spam" effort was about to bear fruit, with Justice agents arresting people that the trade group had helped finger. The problem, according to the Justice official, who asked that his name be withheld, is that some of those people hadn't known up to that time that they were about to be arrested, making the jobs of federal agents potentially more difficult, if not more dangerous.

And, in the end, it turned out that almost none of the more than 100 arrests had much to do with spam. The DMA last year started a "Slam Spam" effort to help find fraudsters in an effort to help define the term "spammer" in a criminal light, so as to provide plenty of differentiation between those petty criminals and DMA members who send out unsolicited commercial emails.

The DMA press office said yesterday evening that the DMA's official release was withheld until after the Justice Department's official Thursday press conference, although a Wednesday DM News piece indicated that journal had received a press release prior to the conference.

DMA spokesman Louis Mastria did say in a phone conversation last night that the group may have responded to queries brought to it, but that, "The DMA did not leak anything."

He characterized the relationship between the DMA and the Department of Justice as "very positive," and indicated that Robert Weintzen's current roll is only an advisory, emeritus position.

Up until this point, government officials hadn't seemed to mind what they characterized as an exaggerated DMA-FBI relationship that the DMA portrayed to journalists. Some suggestive DMA comments, often from former DMA head Robert Weintzen, were seen as a harmless form of trading off the FBI's authority. Weintzen initiated the Slam Spam effort when government regulators and congress were beginning to consider a registry for email marketers much like the Do-Not-Call Registry then being put into effect for telemarketers.

The DMA then was trying to define "spam" as email that involved fraud, rather than the commonly accepted definition of unsolicited email. It raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from members to start an investigative effort to uncover various financial schemes perpetrated via email.

When asked now whether or not the Justice Department has found the Slam Spam effort helpful, a Justice official said that the DMA's claims of "partnership" and degrees of involvement with law enforcement efforts were often exaggerated. But a PDF document on an FBI-related site shows that the Bureau officially acknowledged the DMA and several other trade groups as having helped in last week's Web Snare operation.

The Times story that quoted the DMA's Weintzen had indicated that perhaps 20 to 30 of those arrested would turn out to be Slam Spam targets, which doesn't seem to have proved to be the case. Mastria noted that the DMA cannot know which investigations will be announced at any given time and that he looked forward to additional Slam Spam fruits in the coming weeks and months.

State and federal officials considered some of the arrests confidential because they did not want associates of some of the alleged perpetrators to know that their colleagues had been targeted. Often one such arrest can lead to a trail of several other crooks. In fact, even at the press release last Thursday held by Attorney General John Ashcroft, the identities of some of the arrested individuals were withheld. The Saul Hansell piece in the New York Times that appeared the day before the press conference did not mention specific names of those arrested or those to be arrested.