Anyone with an e-mail knows what spam is, the unsolicited emails, sent out in bulk. It is called junk mail, bulk email and is often referred to as UCE, meaning Unsolicited Commercial E-mail.
In this day and age, roughly 90 million email spam messages go out a day.
Robert Soloway made quite a bit of money by spamming people's e-mail, and in 2005 had already been convicted of spam charges in several civil cases and Microsoft won a $7.8 million judgment against him. He never paid those fines or judgments and, in fact, bragged in an online group discussion that "I've been sued for hundreds of millions of dollars and have had my business running for over 10 years without ever paying a dime, regardless to the outcome of any lawsuits."
Robert Soloway, 28, pleaded guilty to electronic mail fraud, "snail" mail fraud (mail sent via the U.S. Postal Service), and not filing a tax return in 2005,when he reportedly made over $300,000 from his spamming activities, according to his plea agreement.
In 2007 Robert Soloway was arrested by the U.S. Department of Justice on a 35 charge indictment.
"Prosecutors say Soloway used computers infected with malicious code to send out millions of junk e-mails since 2003. The computers are called “zombies” because owners typically have no idea their machines have been infected."
One of the charges against Robert Soloway was for using botnets to send spam and disrupt other computers with Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDos) attacks.
Botnets.
Botnet is a jargon term for a collection of software robots, or bots, which run autonomously and automatically. They run on groups of "zombie" computers controlled remotely. This can also refer to the network of computers using distributed computing software. (Reference)
Robert Soloway was accused of using Chinese ISPs to send out his spam e-mails using a database of 150 million e-mail addresses.
Because Soloway spammed through hijacked computers and open proxies, he has repeatedly violated both the Computer Abuse and Fraud Act of 1984 and the CAN-SPAM law of 2003.
Soloway has been in jail since being arrested in May of 2007 and it looks like he will be there for a long time to come after his sentencing on June 20, 2008.
The senior attorney for Microsoft told reporters in an interview, "There have not been a large number of criminal CAN-SPAM prosecutions in the U.S. This is significant."
This prosecution and guilty plea as well as a stringent sentence of Robert Soloway will hopefully make others think twice about commercial spamming.
Now if you will excuse this writer, I have to go empty 2,263 messages in my gmail spam folder.
Source: By Wake Up Ameria Blog
Comments
Yawn
As I read that, I watched a massive surge in reported spam on the SpamCop site's statistics page. It's at an unprecedented high level and growing exponentially.
The sleazy American criminal spammers know that they've got a far bigger chance of being hit by a falling meteorite than of ever being prosecuted under the You CAN Spam 'law' which has been 'force' for over four years and never made a dent in the spam problem because for all practical purposes it is not enforced at all.
spam abuse
Every day I have to go through numerous e-mail messages trying to decide what was actually sent to me... through my personal e-mail address... and what was not. I know that the Internet has been a marvelous technilogical tool for many Americans, and I am thankfull for it...but so much has happened through the use of this tool that is not only bad for our American way of life, but unhealthy for our children. If we could turn back time do you think that we as Americans would want a different outcome? I certainly would, but then I'm just an individual person, with no options but to delete all "spam".