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Notorious spammer arrested

At least one spammer may actually end up going to jail for the unethical tactics he allegedly used. He's run afoul of anti-spam legislation in the past, including a $10million judgement against him in Oklahoma for violations of the CanSPAM act. It's too bad that the CanSPAM act doesn't have more teeth than it does. Fortunately though, spammers do a whole lot more than violate CanSPAM when they flood our inboxes with trash.

A notorious spammer once sued by Microsoft was arrested in Seattle this morning, a week after a federal grand jury indicted him under seal for allegedly illegal — and prolific — spamming.

Robert Alan Soloway, 27, is scheduled to be arraigned this afternoon in U.S. District Court on 35 counts of mail and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, money laundering and fraud in connection with electronic mail. The indictment was unsealed after Soloway's arrest just before 8 a.m.

Thirty-five counts. Thirty-five. That should be enough to put Mr. Soloway behind bars for a long time, especially since some of the charges are for federal felonies. Now if only this type of action could be taken against ALL spammers, whether they be e-mail spammers or not.

Soloway is accused of, among other things, defrauding customers who paid him to send out high-volume commercial e-mail messages or who bought his software to send the spam themselves. For $495, customers reportedly could have Soloway send e-mails to 20 million addresses for 15 days or sell them 80,000 e-mail addresses.

Imagine that. A spammer being defrauded by another spammer. Isn't that poetic justice? He's accused of defrauding customers "who bought his software to send the spam themselves." So when will those spammers be arrested? I'm not holding my breath.

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