"King of spam" faces 31 criminal counts, decades o

[Medic]

BWAHAHAHAHAHAA! Spammer!

Spam King Robert Holoway behind bars (Roundup)

May 31, 2007, 19:40 GMT

San Francisco - A man known as the king of spam was in federal jail Thursday facing numerous charges for surreptitiously taking over thousands of personal computers and using them to bombard millions of inboxes with with unwanted e-mail marketing messages.

Robert Soloway, 27, is facing 31 counts of fraud, wire fraud, e- mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering. Federal prosecutors are also demanding that Soloway, who ran Newport Internet Marketing Corp, return 772,998 dollars, which represents the proceeds of his activity, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported.

Soloway was arrested on Wednesday and could face decades in jail if found guilty. In a 24-page indictment filed in the US District Court for the District of Washington, US Attorney Jeffrey C Sullivan said Soloway has been operating his illegal scheme since November 2003. He has sent out tens of millions of spam e-mails in an effort to drum up business for his e-mail advertising software, which in turn would send out additional spam.

At an arraignment, Soloway pleaded not guilty to all charges and was ordered held until a hearing on Monday.

Soloway had been at the top of the most wanted list of the anti- spam organization Spamhaus.org, which welcomed the arrest Thursday.

'Soloway has been a long term nuisance on the Internet,' the organization said. 'He has been sending enormous amounts of spam for years, filling mailboxes and mail servers with unsolicited and unwanted junk email. In addition, he has fraudulently marketed his spam services to others as legitimate 'opt-in' services when they were anything but that, duping innocent users and then failing to provide promised customer support or refunds.'

'It's good news for consumers,' said John Levine, a board member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (CAUCE). 'Soloway has been taunting the anti-spam community and federal officials for years, essentially daring them to come after him, and they finally did.'

3 notes. Apparently the identity theft is him using the online correspondences of others, I suppose that may have included internet forum screennames and other stuff.

2nd, holy fuck, $700,000! Now we have a hard number to throw back at any apologist fuckwit of email spam.

Finally: decades in jail. Fucking-A.

(and now for something entirely different: Lindsey Lohan hooked on oxycontin *sigh*)

[Darth Wong]

But ... the free market decided in his favour, by giving him 700000 dollars! You're not a godless hippie leftist, are you?

[K. A. Pital]

So what's the King of Spam will be doing in jail? The inmates don't like spam. At all.

[Lord Zentei]

But ... the free market decided in his favour, by giving him 700000 dollars! You're not a godless hippie leftist, are you?

Seeing as he took over other people's productive resources (computers) without their consent and without paying them for it, this is not an indictment of the free market.

Now, if he had advertised "make 100 dollars easily! Just let me use your computer for spamming people!!" and gotten several thousand people to sign up, that would have been different -- only it would also have been impossible to avoid detection and he wouldn't have made as much money even if successful.

[K. A. Pital]

Seeing as he took over other people's productive resources (computers) without their consent and without paying them for it, this is not an indictment of the free market.

It would be in the interest of the profiteer to have the people less aware, so technically the spammer is just that concept driven to the extreme - unwilling and unknowing human cattle is herded by a pack of thieves. The criminal justice system is in fact a restraint on people's market/trade relations, isn't it, just like the laws themselves, to prevent tricks, bullying and racket, etc. The market doesn't have inner mechanisms to protect against such things at all.

[Lord Zentei]

Seeing as he took over other people's productive resources (computers) without their consent and without paying them for it, this is not an indictment of the free market.

It would be in the interest of the profiteer to have the people less aware, so technically the spammer is just that concept driven to the extreme - unwilling and unknowing human cattle is herded by a pack of thieves. The criminal justice system is in fact a restraint on people's market/trade relations, isn't it, just like the laws themselves, to prevent tricks, bullying and racket, etc. The market doesn't have inner mechanisms to protect against such things at all.

Not so. When one speaks of a free market, that does not entail coerced use of productive resources any more than other types of coerced transactions. A market is not the same thing as an anarchy, regardless of what certain people would have you beleive: it is the willing interaction of independant agents.

[K. A. Pital]

Yeah, actually I agree. The classical political economy includes the legal framework as the basis of market functioning. I just went off a bit to poke the anarcho-nuts' concept of the market.