Man Jailed For 30 Months For Spam-Attacks On AOL Users
Source: Tom's Guide | Keywords: Spam, Jail, NY | Themes: Business
A 27 year old man from Brooklyn New York has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison for spamming AOL subscribers.
According to Reuters the man 22 prior convictions and had also helped run prostitution ring on Craigslist but he has not been criminally charged.
Adam Vitale pleaded guilty to breaking anti-spam laws last year when it was discovered he and another man, Todd Moeller, had sent approximately 250,000 spam messages to more than 1.2 million AOL email addresses.
Any emails the pair sent were sent using several different servers which in turn made it harder to trace their origin. Vitale and Moeller also modified the headers in the emails so as to make it even more difficult to pin the blame on them.
Vitale was also ordered to pay AOL $180,000 in restitution. Court records show Vitale’s accomplice was sentenced to 27 months in jail last November.
The two men were caught out in 2005 when they tried to enter into a deal with a government informant. The deal was that each would receive 50 percent of the profits garnered by the scam. The plan was to send spam emails advertising a computer security program.
Reuters reports that in less than a week, Vitale and Moeller sent emails on behalf of the informant to over 1.25 million AOL email addresses.
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We need more examples of dirtbags like him being dealt with more severely. This scum deserved at least 5 years, or better yet just remove a finger from his hand every time he pushes the button to make his spam program execute.
An individual is innocent until proven guilty. Upon conviction, however, the sentence for a spammer should be Death, within 72 hours. Stop playing games. Put them down and have done with it. Whose interests does any alternative serve? I doubt it's yours, and it certainly isn't mine, because I don't need to pay good money to keep them fed, clothed, and housed in jail. Spamming is not a crime of passion; these people know it's wrong and do it anyway.
An individual is innocent until proven guilty. Upon conviction, however, the sentence for a spammer should be Death, within 72 hours. Stop playing games. Put them down and have done with it. Whose interests does any alternative serve? I doubt it's yours, and it certainly isn't mine, because I don't need to pay good money to keep them fed, clothed, and housed in jail. Spamming is not a crime of passion; these people know it's wrong and do it anyway.
This is an interesting and tempting concept, but unfortunately the financial burden of jailing a criminal is not something they can be legally held responsible for. The punishment has to match the crime.
Most people have gotten a speeding ticket, and yet we don't kill them so as to avoid paying for the clerks and judges and offices that process the tickets.
Maybe we can just put all the spammers in a big hole or something and throw them scraps every now and then. Never mind all the toilets showers clothes and beds.
I occasionally send links to articles here and there to people I know might be interested or amused by the article, and this one is definitely worth sending to ALL the persons in my contact list, but I'll feel dizzy pushing the "Send" button...
Good news anyway. I just wish they did not have to go through government informants. E-mail should be a more secured and more identifiable means of information transport. Will this require a restructuring? Hell yes! Get rid of SMTP and prevent just any computer from sending mail. Armies of zombies do just that.
@virtualban,
Any idea where I can buy a zombie army?
@gm0n3y,
Yes. The "Heroes of Might and Magic" series of games. I'd suggest Heroes3, the classic (which means a reworked version to work on NT based systems, which the original version did not). Or you can borrow them from Adam Vitale for the next at least 30 months (he might be out on parole, but he will be on probation, so no way to really command that army of zombie computers he has already infected. Bad news though is that he won't be able to come out with new versions of them to escape antivirus updates).
Seems like a step in the right direction but we need to have more of these spam and spyware people jailed to really send a message. All you can really do in the mean time is have a strong spam filter like SpamBully and a good AV/antispyware to make the internet less painful
@virtualban
I own a copy of that game actually and some of the newer incarnations.