Caught in U.S. government sting
A New Jersey man has been sentenced to 27 months in prison for spamming 1.2 million America Online subscribers. Todd Moeller, 28, was caught making a deal with a government informant to send spam advertising security software in return for half the profits.
Moeller had worked out a way of 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.
When trying to sell his services to the informant via instant messaging, he bragged 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.
