30 months of bread and water for spammer

Get the bunting out – another spammer is being sent to the clink.

27-year-old Adam Vitale was sentenced by a federal court in Manhattan yesterday to 30 months in prison after sending spam to more than 1.2 million AOL users in less than a week.

Vitale and his business partner Todd Moeller (who was himself sent to prison last November for his part in the scheme) boasted via instant messages with a confidential government informant that they could send emails without risk of their origin being tracked back. Earlier in the case, Vitale pleaded guilty under the CAN-SPAM Act to falsifying email headers and using a variety of computer servers in order to evade detection by AOL’s spam-filtering system.

According to court records, Vitale wanted a share of the profits made from selling the goods sold via spam.

Vitale was also ordered to pay $180,000 to AOL, which is presumably going to make a dent in his pocket. Do prison uniforms have pockets? I’m not sure.

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.