Ed and Brian Krassenstein were making money from Ponzi schemes and illegal porn sites. One of the web addresses that they owned was 17onlygirls (dot) com. They were domain name squatters who specialized in web addresses that promoted child porn and illegal Ponzi schemes. Ponzi fraud type sites were also a part of their business. They ran investment forums TalkGold and MoneyMakerGroup until the Department of Justice accused them of profiting from Ponzi scheme promoters through the sites. They owned tens of thousands of web domains, which they sold to the highest bidder while pretending not to know that the domains would be used for.
Screenshots of his messages from 2007 appear to show him negotiating over buying three addresses: TeenPies.com, TeenPie.com, and TeenPorn101.com.
There is no suggestion that the Krassensteins ran porn sites themselves. But by buying porn site domains, they stood to gain from selling or leasing those addresses.
They were being investigated by the FBI. A civil asset forfeiture was filed against them. Federal agents raided their homes and seized almost half a million dollars from the brothers in 2017, obtained from selling ads for Ponzi schemes on investment web forums that they ran. They entered a plea agreement to forfeit the some of the profits and avoid jail.
