AOL Employee Gets Jail Time For Spamming
AOL Spammer Sentenced to 15 Months
Spam does not pay... a former America Online engineer who stole the usernames and more than 90 million email addresses of registered AOL account holders was sentenced earlier this month to 15 months in prison.
Jason Smathers used the stolen AOL account data to send more than 7 billion spam e-mails before he sold the entire AOL account list to another spammer for $28,000 in cash.
Smathers who is 25 years old agreed to a plea bargain with the government to help identify fellow spammers and, in return, received a much shorter sentence, in the most recent black eye development for AOL. America Online earning announcement of in early 2004 still holds the record the biggest corporate loss ever in business history.
As one of the first people to be prosecuted under the new CAN Spam Legislation, Smathers was facing up to 10 years in federal prison before his coped a plea and sang like a canary.
AOL had no comment about their security policies and lack of in-house enforecement. AOL is still planning on raising their member fees in the coming months, despite the recent onslaught of AOL subscriber cancellations.
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