A company calling itself Lover Spy has begun offering a way for jealous lovers -- and anyone else -- to spy on the computer activity of their mates by sending an electronic greeting, the equivalent of a thinking-of-you card, that doubles as a bugging device.

Computer security experts said the Lover Spy service and software appeared to violate US law, but also said the surveillance program pointed to an increasingly common way for hackers to seize control of computers.

Marketed as a way to "catch a cheating lover,'' the Lover Spy company offers to send an email greeting card to lure the victim to a Web site that will download onto the victim's computer a Trojan program to be used for spying.

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