AOL Spammer Pleads Guilty
On Monday, Adam Vitale pleaded guilty in a federal court to filling the inboxes of 1.2 million AOL subscribers with spam e-mails in less than a week in August 2005, thereby violating anti-spam laws. The Brooklyn man was caught making a deal with a government informant.
Prosecutors say that Vitale and Todd Moeller, from New Jersey, got past AOL’s spam filter system by utilizing several different servers to send e-mails while altering header information to avoid being tracked.
Moeller reportedly told the informant that he had 40 computer servers at his disposal and raked in $40,000 per month from sending spam messages involving stock promotion.
Vitale is scheduled to be sentenced on September 13 and faces a maximum sentence of 11 years behind bars, while Moeller faces the same fate.
Robert Alan Soloway, nicknamed the "Spam King" by prosecutors, was arrested almost two weeks ago on charges of mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering. He continued his operations even after losing $7 million to Microsoft in a civil suit in 2005, and $10 million to a small Internet service provider in Oklahoma. Prosecutors say that Soloway has been operating since 2003 and has sent millions of spam e-mails.
Soloway, a 27 year-old who was once on the top 10 list of spammers according to the Spamhaus Project, faces decades in prison, though the exact sentence range has not been determined by prosecutors yet.
Early reports suggested that he was such a large spammer that e-mail users would notice a decline in spam messages they received, though there are still many spammers even bigger than Soloway located outside of the U.S.
Sources:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070611/wr_nm/crime_spam_dc;_
ylt=Avo6yGKu1xV_MxgKHooYTtH6VbIF
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/business/20070601_Spammers_
arrest_called_only_symbolic.html
