NJ man gets two years jail for AOL spam scam
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New Jersey man was sentenced to more than two years in prison on Friday for helping send "spam" e-mails to more than 1.2 million America Online subscribers.
Todd Moeller, 28, was sentenced 27 months in prison in a federal court in New York after he was caught making a deal with a government informant to send junk e-mails -- known as spam -- advertising a computer security program in return for 50 percent of the profits, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan said.
Moeller and Adam Vitale of New York pleaded guilty earlier this year to breaking anti-spam laws and defeating AOL's filter system by using a variety of computer servers and changing the header information on e-mails to ensure they could not be traced, court papers said.
Moeller told the informant via instant messaging he could conceal the source of the e-mails through his access to 40 different servers and had profited $40,000 a month from other spam e-mail scams that promoted stocks, prosecutors said.
In one week in August 2005 Moeller and Vitale sent e-mails on behalf of the informant to more than 1.27 million addresses of subscribers at AOL, the online division of Time Warner Inc.
Vitale will be sentenced Nov. 13.
