A federal judge in San Francisco Wednesday slapped an injunction on a California company accused of spamming millions of messages touting mortgage services and other products.

Judge Samuel Conti ordered Los Angeles residents Rick Yang and Peonie Pui Ting Chen to immediately stop operations of their spamming companies, Optin Global, Inc. and Vision Media Limited Corp., then froze the firms' assets.

Both the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and California's attorney general, Bill Lockyer, had filed the 13-count lawsuit against the spammers, who they said violated both the federal 15-month-old CAN-SPAM Act and California's recently-revised anti-spam statute.

"Since at least Jan. 1, 2004, and continuing to the present (the) defendants have initiated the transmission of hundreds of thousands of commercial e-mail messages," the complaint said.

According to the FTC, the more than 1.8 million spam messages sent in the last year included links to Web sites run by the defendants that hawked everything from mortgage services and car warranties to prescription drugs and college degrees. Leads generated by the defendants' mortgage sites were eventually sold though middlemen to name-brand lenders and brokers such as Ameriquest Mortgage and Mortgage South, the complaint read.

Yang and Chen violated a whole host of provisions of CAN-SPAM. "Most of the 1.8 million e-mail messages sent to the FTC by the public demonstrate that they were violating almost every provision of the Act," the FTC said in a statement.

The two face damages sought by the FTC and penalties that could be levied by California to the tune of $1,000 per spam.

"My office will continue to aggressively prosecute those who flout our anti-spam laws," said Lockyer in a statement.