The Baltimore Sun is reporting that a former America Online software engineer by the name of Jason Smathers was sentenced yesterday to fifteen months in prison for stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses and selling them to spammers who sent out up to 7 billion unsolicited e-mail messages.
Smathers admitted that he accepted $28,000 from Sean Dunaway of Las Vegas who wanted to pitch an offshore gambling site to AOL customers, knowing that the list of screen names might make its way to others who would send e-mail solicitations.
In a letter from Smathers to the court, part of which was read into the record by Assistant U.S. Attorney David Siegal, Smathers tried to explain the crimes that AOL has said cost the company at least $300,000 and possibly millions of dollars. “Cyberspace is a new and strange place,” Siegal said Smathers wrote. “I was good at navigating in that frontier, and I became an outlaw.”
Source: The Baltimore Sun
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