Spam King Busted by Secret Service

An anonymous reader writes "Adam Vitale, aka Batch1 aka Baxter, 25, of Boynton Beach, FL, and his partner Todd Moeller, aka M3rk, of New Jersey, are accused of sending nearly 50,000 pieces of spam e-mail to more than 1.2 million AOL subscribers. US Secret Service agents used a confidential informant to hire Moeller and Vitale to deliver spam, which advertised a computer security product."

Comments

Mugshot

[XorNand]

The poor (rich?) sap's booking photo, complete with ::gulp:: his address. Too bad spammers aren't required to disclose their email address on arrest.

Re:Secret Service?

[TripMaster Monkey]

Check here to see all the duties of the Secret Service....among them, you will find:

• Investigating credit and debit card fraud, computer fraud, and electronic fund transfer fraud

SS investigates fraud

[slackaddict]

... The Secret Service also investigates violations of laws relating to counterfeiting of obligations and securities of the United States; financial crimes that include, but are not limited to, access device fraud, financial institution fraud, identity theft, computer fraud; and computer-based attacks on our nation's financial, banking, and telecommunications infrastructure.

and also

Since 1984, our investigative responsibilities have expanded to include crimes that involve financial institution fraud, computer and telecommunications fraud, false identification documents, access device fraud, advance fee fraud, electronic funds transfers, and money laundering as it relates to our core violations.

These guys are spammers. If they've advertised p3nis enlargement pills, they've committed fraud and, according to the Secret Service they have jurisdiction over this area. Disclaimer: IANAL

Read for yourself: http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/mission.shtml

How to send 50k messages to 1.2M people:

[aclidiere]

For the sake of the demonstration, I'll pick smaller numbers. Send 2 messages to 5 persons, A, B, C, D, E.

1) Send message #1 to A, B, C.
2) Send message #2 to C, D, E.

It is not said that all 1.5M people received each of the 50k messages.

In spam emails, the From: and To: fields are often erroneous. In that case, the actual recipients are in the Bcc field. So, several people receive a same message that seems addressed to only one.

Other comment:
50k distinct emails to a total of 1.5M people

Re:Not always.

[Pig Hogger]

Even used MSDN-AA? It and many other services want an email address to sign up, and then will start with the box "Send me a buncha stuff in email" checked, which is pretty abhorrent.

Caveat emptor. This is what disposable e-mails are for...

Google is perfect, because the addresses are "plussed", so you can add a special code ("pig.hogger+bullshit@gmail.com") to tag where you give your e-mail to, and if you see different junk coming in, you know very well who's the sleazy fucker who sold your e-mail. At that time, you can filter out the "+bullshit" emails...

Re:Illegal?

[AJWM]

It's trespass on the bot computers. As soon as they're used to send email claiming to be from elsewhere, that's fraud. Stealing a checkbook is simple theft, writing checks with it is fraud.