Court convicts four for illegal spamming

BEIJING - A Beijing court found four people guilty on Tuesday of illegally sending millions of spam messages to mobile phone users as part of a business.

The conviction is unprecedented in China, where spam senders distribute an average of 8.5 junk massages a week to each of China's 700 million mobile-phone users, according to official figures for 2010.

Prosecutors said the four men had used computer software since November 2008 to collect the numbers of mobile phones registered in Beijing and had sent out more than 10 million junk messages - about 300,000 each week - without a license. The messages consisted mainly of advertisements for homes, furniture, ring tones and mobile games.