Judge Slaps Serial Spammer With 30 Months in the Slammer

[WSJ Law Blog]

We wonder whether it ever occurred to 27 year-old Adam Vitale that he could get could get serious time for his spamming habit. In any event, now he’s got 30 months to think about it.

According to this Reuters report, Vitale was caught making a deal with a government informant to send junk e-mails that advertised a computer security program in return for 50% of the product’s profits.

Click here for the 2006 indictment, which actually makes for some pretty good reading. We send out a lot of emails on a daily basis — as we’re sure the average LB reader does — but we ain’t got nothing on these guys. According to the indictment, Vitale sent out over 1 million emails over the course of one week in August 2005. He was prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1037, the anti-spam statute passed in 2003.

Yesterday, the SDNY’s Judge Denny Chin gave Vitale 30 months for sending the spam e-mails to more than 1.2 million AOL subscribers in a scheme that reportedly foiled the AOL’s spam-filtering system. Chin also hit Vitale with a $180,000 restitution bill, to be paid to AOL. (Vitale’s partner-in-crime, Todd Moeller, was sentenced last November to 27 months for his role in the scheme.)

“Spamming is serious criminal conduct; this is not a teenager engaging in child’s play,” said Judge Chin.