One of world's top 10 spammers held in Seattle

[Warpy]

Feds say computer users will notice decrease in junk e-mail following arrest

SEATTLE - A 27-year-old man described as one of the world’s most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday, and federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.

Robert Alan Soloway is accused of using networks of compromised “zombie” computers to send out millions upon millions of spam e-mails.
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A federal grand jury last week returned a 35-count indictment against Soloway charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.

Much more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18955115/

[Johonny]

1. Isn't junk email

a form of terrorism. Why isn't this guy in GITMO?

[MadBadger]

2. Throw em the book

[Zookeeper]

3. That's the best news I've heard all day....

Chain him to a computer and make him read his own spam for 10 years. }(

[supernova]

4. Increasing the manhood

he can read all about it .... all day long!

[Zookeeper]

5. LOL!

Yes, that should bring him, ummm, down. :+

[blondeatlast]

12. Or force him to write a killer filter program! nt

[Az]

6. There is an inner desire to lock him in a room with 20 System Admins for an hour

The spam isn't what is illegal. Its how spammers get their spam distributed that is illegal. See spam is all about cheating. The idea being that you want to minimize the cost of distributing advertisement. This is why email on its own is a huge draw. But the volume of spam needed to be sent out to make a significant profit becomes increasingly expensive as the bandwidth needs increase. So what spammers do is cheat.

They probe the net in various ways looking for unsecured computers. Once they find them they place a rogue program in their system that will receive an email from the spammer and resend it to millions of email addresses. In this way the spammer removes the costs they have to incur due to bandwidth and forces the burden onto the netizens in general.

[Swede]

7. Here's a link to Spamhaus top 200 spammers.

Imagine the millions of dollars of wasted production he costs.

http://www.spamhaus.org/Rokso/

[DS1]

8. Kill him

/not kidding

[TlalocW]

9. I remember a story a few years back

About another Spam King and how he was building himself a new $700,000 mansion somewhere, and some netizens found out his address wasn't unlisted yet and signed him for every piece of junk snail mail that they could, and he whined about it.

That made me smile.

TlalocW

[helderheid]

10. rec 5

[LostInAnomie]

11. But.. but... I thought he was a Nigerian prince!?

Shouldn't he have diplomatic immunity?

I hope he doesn't get locked up before he can transfer that $8,000,000 into my bank account.

[jmowreader]

13. The feds, as usual, are wrong

It's great they busted Robert Alan Soloway.

What would be a good punishment? Ohhhhh...how about sticking him in a cell with an e-mail client that can't send and can't delete, and forcing him to read spam for sixteen hours a day, every day, for the next ten years or so? Better: publicize his e-mail address soeveryone can sign him up for spam. There's probably a Fourth Amendment issue here--but fuck it, it's no more cruel than what he did to us.

What they're WRONG about is the idea that busting Soloway will have any effect on the amount of spam on the Internets for more than maybe a week. The boner pill companies still have to advertise, right? The porn sites still have to advertise. The outfit that wants people to help Bush figure out whether he likes chocolate or vanilla ice cream better still has to advertise. Nothing is stopping all of Soloway's clientele from changing to one of those other nine spammers--or to the new number-ten guy, now that Soloway's out of the way.

They arrested the biggest spammer who ever lived, he's going to jail and that's great, but at the end of next week the spam will come down heavier than ever.