“Spam King” Soloway's arrest could not stop Spam flow

“Spam King” Robert Alan Soloway’s arrest had globally raised hopes for the relief from millions of unwanted message clogging e-mail in-boxes, but they were shattered when Junk e-mail continued to hit mailboxes around the world Thursday, a day after spammer’s high-profile arrest.

Soloway, who was once on the top 10 list of spammers kept by an international anti-spam organization, the Spamhaus Project, was arrested Wednesday on charges of mail fraud, wire fraud, electronic mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.

Despite the arrest of the notorious Seattle spam marketer, the mailboxes around the world choked up with junk e-mail yesterday. Although the spammer is nabbed and his operations are shuttered, but spam experts suppose his arrest hardly makes any difference.

"In the short term, the effect it's going to have is more symbolic more than anything else," said John Levine, co-author of "Fighting Spam for Dummies." "Soloway is a large spammer, but hardly the only large spammer."

Soloway, whose arrest followed an indictment by a federal grand jury in Seattle last week, is currently being held without bail after his initial appearance in US District Court on Wednesday. The federal prosecutors labeled him as the "Spam King" for allegedly sending hundreds of millions of spam e-mails through hijacked networks.

The indictment accuses the Seattle man and his company, Newport Internet Marketing, of fake business practices, which include sale of broadcast e-mail products and services that amounted to spam. He is the first spammer in the country to be indicted with aggravated identity theft under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

The federal investigators believe that the accused has made more than $1 million over four years by sending millions of spam for a business Soloway said he started when he was a teenager. Prosecutors say the spammer has sent millions of junk e-mails since 2003 and even didn’t stop after the software giant, Microsoft Corp. won a $7 million civil judgment against him in 2005 and the operator of a small Internet service provider in Oklahoma won a $10 million judgment.

Investigators seized computers and related equipment, reams of documents, DVDs, CDs, two iPods, a TV and a digital camera from his downtown Seattle penthouse apartment and a public storage unit in Bellevue. They believe that Soloway has sent more than 90 million e-mails in three months, through just two of the servers he used. In addition, he sent 120 million e-mails to nearly 80,000 addresses via three other servers connected to him.

"Spam is a scourge of the Internet, and Robert Soloway is one of its most prolific practitioners," Jeffrey C. Sullivan, US Attorney for Western Washington, said in a prepared statement.

If convicted, Soloway will be slapped with fines of over US$772,000, which is the amount he illegally obtained from his illicit operations and forfeiture of other money and property as well.

Soloway’s detention hearing is scheduled for next Monday. However, prosecutors have not yet calculated what sentence range he might face, but it is estimated that Soloway could spend decades behind bars.

Soloway’s arrest comes four months after MySpace.com, the world’s leading social networking site, filed lawsuit against another "Spam King" Scott Richter, a Colorado man once accused of being one of the world's top three spammers, for violations of state and federal laws including the CAN-SPAM Act and California's anti-spam statute.

This year in January, MySpace, which is owned by News Corp., filed the suit in United States District Court in Los Angeles, accusing Richter and his various companies, including OptInRealBig.com and Mediabreakway.com, of breaching state and federal anti-spamming laws by using stolen passwords to gain access to MySpace users’ account and using the information without their knowledge to send spam bulletins.