Thursday, March 27, 2008

"King of Spam" Arrested

3rd SE Quadrant\The Approval Matrix: Week of March 31, 2008


The notorious spammer authorities dubbed "the king of spam" is facing a possible 26-year jail sentence after pleading guilty in Seattle on Friday to charges of fraud and tax evasion.

Robert Soloway, 28, had already been found guilty of spam charges in several civil cases -- Microsoft won a $7.8 million judgment against him in 2005 -- but had avoided paying fines in those cases.

In a 2005 discussion group post, Soloway bragged, "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." That year, Soloway raked in more than $300,000 from his spam operations, according to his plea agreement. -- Yahoo! News

Soloway is charged with using hijacked zombie computers and spoofing to send out millions of spam e-mails since 2003. Some e-mails sent by Soloway's company contained false header information making them appear to have been sent from MSN and Hotmail addresses. As a result of this he was sued by Microsoft and ordered to pay $7 million in damages in December 2003. -- Wikipedia

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