Robert Soloway, one of the people crowned with the title “Spam King”, has been released from jail. He was an extremely prolific spammer, generating over 10 trillion messages over the course of his career.
As Mr. Soloway exits jail, another spammer heads to serve his 20 year sentence. Peter Maxson Anyanyueze sent Nigerian 419 spams telling people they could profit from helping him move money around. The scam is that the victim needs to pay small amounts of money, sometimes totalling tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Spammers and the law
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Which is all good and well, but you miss the mainsleaze spammers pumping out ‘engaging email campaigns’ …
They are equally likely to be committing criminal offences under varying harassment and telecommunications laws around the world. “Strange in fact, but true in law”.
The problem is that so few of these spammers are prosecuted. As one of the FBI agents from the computer crime office said when talking about Soloway in 2005, “if what his are doing is illegal, why is he still doing it.”
When sentenced Robert Smoley, they charged him with money laundering and running illegal internet pharmacies, not for illegally advertising his illegal internet pharmacies with spam. When the FTC went after y went after Global Web promotions, Michael John Anthony Van Essen, and Lance Thomas Atkinson in 2005 they seized some money, but did not put them out of business. Eventually in 2009, the FTC finally did enough damage to shut down their Affking spam network.