Spam Justice: Spammer gets 2 years for AOL scam

A spammer from New Jersey who sent spam to 1.27 million AOL email addresses was sentenced to two years.

 
Isn't there something better than an AOL email account? Just another example of what happens in an unregulated, unsupervised, and unenforceable system.

Via Cnet:

Todd Moeller, 28, was sentenced 27 months in prison in a federal court in New York after he was caught making a deal with a government informant to send junk e-mails advertising a computer security program in return for 50 percent of the profits, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan said.

Moeller and Adam Vitale of New York pleaded guilty earlier this year to breaking antispam laws and defeating AOL's filter system by using a variety of computer servers and changing the header information on e-mails to ensure they could not be traced, court papers said.

Moeller told the informant via instant messaging he could conceal the source of the e-mails through his access to 40 different servers and had profited $40,000 a month from other spam e-mail scams that promoted stocks, prosecutors said.

In one week in August 2005 Moeller and Vitale sent e-mails on behalf of the informant to more than 1.27 million addresses of subscribers at AOL, the online division of Time Warner.

Vitale will be sentenced November 13.