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You may be jailed for spamming
By siliconindia
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Friday, 18 July 2008, 17:11 IST
New York: Beware! Sending a spam is enough for police to take you to jail. A federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday sentenced a Brooklyn man, named Adam Vitale, to 30 months imprisonment for sending spam e-mails to more than 1.2 million subscribers of America Online (AOL), the online division of Time Warner. In this filthy act, Vitale, along with another man Todd Moeller, defeated AOL's filter system by using several different computer servers to relay the e-mails and changed the e-mail header information to ensure the spam e-mails could not be traced back to them.
Vitale was sentenced after pleading guilty more than a year ago to breaking anti-spam laws. He was also ordered to pay $180,000 to AOL in restitution. Moeller, another defendant in the case, was sentenced last November to 27 months for his role in the scheme.
U.S. District Judge Denny Chin was very clear on the relevance of his judgment. He told Vitale while announcing the sentence, "Spamming is serious criminal conduct; this is not a teenager engaging in child's play," Vitale earlier apologized and said he had learned a lesson.
Vitale was caught red hand while making a deal with a government informant to send junk e-mails that advertised a computer security program in return for 50 percent of the product's profits, prosecutors said.
According to prosecutors, Vitale had 22 prior convictions and also had a role in running an online prostitution ring on the Web site www.craigslist.com, but he has not been criminally charged.
Vitale and Moeller sent e-mails on behalf of the informant to more than 1,277,000 addresses of subscribers at AOL in less than a week in August 2005, said court papers.
