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24 Jul 2008
A man described by Microsoft as one of the top 10 spammers in the world has been sentenced to nearly four years in jail after pleading guilty to charges of fraud, spamming and tax evasion.
Robert Soloway, dubbed the Spam King, admitted to using a utility called Dark Mailer to send more than 50,000 emails an hour to internet users.
The software changed the headers of emails to that of the recipient's address to fool spam filters.
"I take full responsibility for everything I've done. I am sorry for all the people that got the emails," he said. "I am very embarrassed and ashamed."
Prosecutors had asked for nine years in prison, considering the scale of his activities and the fact that he had been caught spamming in 1999.
Soloway had promised to change his ways, but had simply moved to a different state and carried on as before.
"The government believes that it is important to recognise and pronounce publicly, and emphatically, that fraud in email is a serious crime," said the prosecution team. "The financial and societal costs of this crime are immense."
The defence team argued for leniency as Soloway's software did not interfere with individual PCs, did not try to spread malware and never advertised pornography.
Soloway will also serve three years probation and do 200 hours of community service. Prosecutors wanted to seize $705,000 in property but Soloway maintains that most of the money has already been spent.
Microsoft has also won a case against Soloway and been awarded $7.8m in a civil case, but is unlikely to see any financial reward. An American ISP has also been awarded more than $10m in a similar case.
It seems likely that Soloway will not spend his sentence at a low security facility, after another spammer escaped from jail this weekend.
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Dealing with the infection...
I wish I could come up with an answer to this to simply make it impossible to spam and I have the feeling that there's something really obvious and simple that we've all missed. That doesn't mean there is of course, the feeling is probably in the same category as deja-vu. My gut feeling is that the answer is somewhere in the SMTP protocol and using secure key pairs. The one common factor about rogues is they like to be anonymous, to wear digitial hoodies so they can't be identified, so this is where I believe the effort needs to be put. If their ability to hide is removed we are getting somewhere. It seems that focussing on making it impossible to hide could be a good approach, and although it appears as if it's not addressing the problem head on it is in fact getting right to the core of Internet fraud, spamming and other abuse of the Internet. The down side would be that in oppressive countries it would remove the ability for people to have outside contact, but if the Internet grinded to a halt then it wouldn't be any good for anyone. In the mean time it would appear the law has upped the stakes, but hasn't addressed it fully because it has an interest in doing the very same thing. Why do you think that advertisers can have so much sway in the world, and how is it that junk mail comes through your door every day despite the impact on the world, and how come newspapers are printed in such large quantities when we already have the digital technology to do without? Those that are the law makers are also the law breakers, and while there is this duality in the thinking of the business world there will not be a concerted effort to remove parasites from the body of the Internet.
Posted by: David Lambert 25 Jul 2008