Soloway case reveals big business behind spam

The volume of spam that a single ISP handles is staggering. AOL sends 700 million pieces of e-mail a day to its 60 million active AOL e-mail users, Sullivan said. Of those e-mails, on a bad day as many as 30 per cent can end up in spam folders, he said.

Still, in perhaps an indication of how good the spammers have become, Sullivan said he couldn't point to a single piece of evidence that AOL had ever sent or intercepted a spam e-mail from Soloway or the program he sold.

Over 400 complaints have been filed about Newport Internet Marketing to various organizations, including the Better Business Bureau, the US Federal Trade Commission and the US Attorney General, said Kenneth Schmutz, a special agent in the FBI's computer crime squad who opened the investigation on Soloway.

One such victim was Thomas Miller, who runs a nonprofit, nondenominational religious organization that counsels death row inmates and helps jobless and hungry people in Ohio. Newport Internet Marketing offered to run a free e-mail campaign for Miller, who was looking to raise money for his organization. Instead, Miller's Web site was ultimately shut down by his hosting company after the company found that large amounts of spam e-mail were being sent from his account, purportedly by Soloway.

Miller estimates he lost US$12,000 to $24,000 throughout the debacle while he scrambled to get a new site up and lost potential donations because he was without the site. He said he testified at the hearings because it was the right thing to do, but he doesn't have high expectations. "I don't believe I'll ever get anything," he said.

Miller and the others spoke on the second and not yet final day of sentencing hearings for Soloway, who pled guilty to federal charges of fraud and tax evasion for his role in sending or facilitating the sending of untold number of spam e-mail. While it's unusual for a sentencing hearing to be scheduled for two days, this one will last even longer, since all the witnesses did not have time to take the stand by the end of the day Monday. The final day of hearings should be July 22, when the judge will most likely hand down a sentence. The government is asking for a sentence 14 years in prison and has said it will ask for a separate restitution hearing to determine how much money, if any, Soloway should pay victims.

Soloway has already lost civil cases filed by Microsoft and another ISP in Oklahoma. He was ordered to pay Microsoft US$7.8 million and the Oklahoma ISP US$10 million, although he has yet to begin paying either.