While both Microsoft and an ISP have won multi-million dollar judgments against Robert Alan Soloway for spamming, he apparently kept on spamming. This time around, he might not have it so easy.
Rather than a civil case from a company, he's now been arrested for sending out millions of spam emails over a zombie network he put together -- and it looks like the feds threw everything they could think of against him: mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Apparently, the identity theft part was for "taking over someone's domain" (though, it's not clear here if they mean falsifying an email address or for the zombie network). Either way, it's hard to believe that this will really have much of an impact. After all, other spammers have been arrested (and jailed) before and it's not like the spam has gone down.
So it seems a bit ridiculous for the federal authorities who are going after the guy to claim that people should see the amount of spam they receive start going down due to this arrest. Someone else will simply step in and fill the gap pretty quickly.
Full Version: Top Spammer Arrested... But Will It Matter?
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