Fired AOL Engineer Gets 15 Month Sentence

FormFactor

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

Shorty

Cyberspace is a new and strange place," Siegal said Smathers wrote. "I was good at navigating in that frontier, and I became an outlaw."

You ain't Billy the kid son and this aint the wild west :shakehead

airbornflght

heh heh heh...I have to give the kid props though...guess its cause im in oklahoma and their are large parts of the state that are still "natural" and thats were i grew up and continue too and we get away with a lot more stuff that people from states like NY and other large states.

But the internet at the place to take your revenge out on.

Leonardo

It's simple. He's a greedy dirtbag that didn't care about his customers, selling them out for his own profit. Prisons were made for garbage like that.