A Connecticut man was sentenced to seven years in jail for scamming nearly half a million dollars out of AOL users.

Michael Dolan last year pleaded guilty to fraud and aggravated identity theft charges along with five other men. The men ran a scam between 2002 and 2006 whereby they infected AOL users computers with software that asked for their personal details before they logged into their AOL accounts.

Dolan and his accomplices garnered a reported $400,000 from sending out fake greeting cards to AOL email addresses. Once a user opened the ecard, the malicious software would install itself on the victims computer. Another method of gathering credit card and bank details from unsuspecting AOLers was to send them an email masquerading as AOL experiencing server problems and requesting their bank details within 24 hours.

Dolan’s lawyer requested a shorter sentence, claiming his client had a mental illness and had been making bad decisions ever since his father had commit suicide. This request was not granted, which we think may have had something to do with the fact that prior to his participation in the AOL scam, he spent 9 months in jail for violation of a two year probation he incurred for accessing a protected computer without authorization.

According to InfoWorld, U.S. assistant attorney Edward Chang described Dolan as, “a leader of criminals” and said attempted to bribe a co-defendant, threatened to kill someone he thought was a government informant, and suborned perjury from his girlfriend.

The other five defendants also pleaded guilty and one is to be sentenced today.

(Via InfoWorld)