Jail for AOL Email Address Thief

A man who previously worked for internet service providing giant AOL has been sentenced to jail time for selling 92,000,000 AOL email addresses to spammers. Smathers received $28,000 for the addresses from a spammer wanting to advertise online gambling services.

Jason Smathers pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in a plea deal. As a result, he will have to serve about 15 months behind bars.

The exact cost to AOL is unclear. Some estimates range up to about $500,000 in deploying additional software to block spam mail. Since the resulting email campaigns resulted in billions of email messages, the amount of time lost by AOL subscribers is immense.

At first, the judge declined Smathers' attempts to plead guilty, saying he was unsure if his actions in fact constituted a crime. Upon the prosecution presenting additional evidence, the judge chose to accept his plea.

Unfortunately, the SpamButcher anti-spam filter does not function for AOL users. There are fairly few options for America Online customers besides accepting the anti-spam solution they provide.

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