Spammer Robert Soloway Arrested

Mike writes "Yahoo is reporting that US prosecutors captured Robert Soloway, a prolific Internet marketer responsible so much junk e-mail they called him "Spam King." Soloway was arrested in Seattle, Washington, a week after being indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud. Soloway is accused of using botnets to disguise where e-mail originated and of forging return addresses of real people or businesses for his mass mailings. If convicted as charged, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of more than 65 years in prison and a fine of 250,000 dollars."

Comments

Anyone else think we have our priorities mixed?

[StringBlade]

If convicted as charged, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of more than 65 years in prison and a fine of 250,000 dollars.

However, if you infringe on someone's copyright in the U.S. then your maximum fine is $250,000 per infringement not to mention a possible 5 year jail sentence as well.

Clearly spam's a problem, but not as big of a problem as Napster and Limewire - after all, the Spam King was making money and Napster was just giving away music!

Lesson: If you're going to be a nuisance to people and corporations, make sure you make lots of money doing it so your punishment isn't as severe for proving you're a good capitalistic American.

Re:give hima real punishment...

[Ed_Pinkley]

Here are some fuzzy numbers from google / wiki.
1) He was sending 20 million emails over 15 days. Let's call that 1 million emails per day.
2) He was doing this since 2003. Let's call that 3 years.
3) 3 Years * 365 Days * 1 million emails per day is 1,095,000,000 emails.
4) Some spam emails are obvious and some are not. Lets say it takes you, on average, 5 seconds additional time to detect and delete a spam email. That's 5,475,000,000 seconds he has cost people.
5) 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours, 365.25 days = 173 years.
6) That doesn't include cpu cycles waisted or law enforcement costs. That's 2+ lifetimes. *just in wasted time*.

Even if I am off by an order of magnitude. I'm ok with years of prison. (I'm also ok with higher penalties for drunk driving, but that's another story.)