 Spam
King arrested in USA -
31/05/2007 |
A 27-year-old man,
dubbed the ‘Spam King’ by investigators, has been arrested in the USA
where he has been indicted on charges of mail fraud, wire fraud, fraud in
connection with electronic mail, and money laundering.
Robert Alan Soloway
owned Newport Internet Marketing Corporation (NIM) based in Seattle, USA.
He will appear before Seattle's district on 31/05/2007.
According to prosecutors, Mr
Soloway was responsible for tens of millions of unsolicited e-mails
promoting his own company between November 2003 and May 2007.
As part of the
scheme, Soloway spammed tens of millions of email messages to advertise
the NIM websites from which he sold his product and services. Soloway
constantly “moved” this website, which was hosted on at least 50 different
domains.
In at least one
instance Soloway used another person’s credit card to pay for the domain
name used to host the NIM website.
Since 2006, Soloway
registered the domain names through Chinese Internet Service Providers in
an apparent effort to hide the true ownership of the domain names used to
host the NIM website.
The spammed messages
used to advertise the NIM websites contained false and fraudulent header
information, and were relayed using networks of proxy computers (“botnets”)
to disguise the true originating IP addresses of the spam. Many of the
false headers contained forged e-mail addresses or domain names that
belonged to other real people, businesses, or organizations, causing these
other innocent parties to mistakenly be blamed for spam transmitted by
Soloway. Innocent parties whose email addresses and domain names were
forged by Soloway sometimes had their legitimate addresses “blacklisted”
as spam sources, as a result.
Soloway refused to
remove email addresses from his distribution lists, leaving some victims
with no choice but to close their email accounts or cancel established
domain names to stop the spamming.
A US lawyer said Mr Soloway was
the first person to be prosecuted for sending out spam e-mails using
federal laws against identity theft.
Prosecutors want to seize the
sum of $773,000 (£391,000) that Mr Soloway is said to have made from his
firm.
If convicted of all
the charges, he also faces a fine of $250,000 (£126,500) and a maximum
prison term of 65 years.
Source:
The Register, BBC, United States Attorney's Office
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