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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."

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  1. Re:give hima real punishment... by Ed_Pinkley · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.)

    --
    "Long time listener, first time caller."