AOL email thief gets 15 month jail term - silicon.com

AOL email thief gets 15 month jail term

Smathers for the slammer - after helping spammers
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By Reuters

Published: Thursday 18 August 2005

A former AOL employee was sentenced to 15 months in prison on Wednesday for stealing 92 million email screen names from the internet company and selling them to a spammer.

Jason Smathers, 25, pleaded guilty in February in federal court in Manhattan to charges including conspiracy and interstate trafficking of stolen property. He was paid $28,000 by an internet marketer for the names, which were taken from AOL's database of 30 million subscribers at the time.

Other defendants in spam cases have received tougher sentences. Last year, a New York state man known as the "Buffalo Spammer" was sentenced to between three and a half and seven years in prison for violating state forgery and identity-theft laws.

Smathers co-operated with prosecutors and appeared sorrowful in court on Wednesday, surrounded by family members. He faced up to 24 months in prison under federal guidelines.

He told US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein: "I know I have done something very wrong."

Prosecutors said AOL, a unit of Time Warner, suffered an estimated loss of $300,000 from employee time spent dealing with the issue, as well as hardware and software expenses.

Hellerstein said that while AOL's loss estimate was hard to prove, the offence was still serious.

"People use email as a primary measure of communication these days," he said. "Companies need to preserve the integrity of the information they have."

In stealing the email names of AOL customers, Smathers created "the sale of a line of products customers had no need for", the judge said.

In a letter to the judge, Smathers pleaded for leniency. He described himself as "an outlaw" in the "new frontier" of cyberspace.

Prosecutor David Siegal said he found Smathers' letter "moving", but told the judge that "the internet is not lawless". He estimated AOL suffered a loss of 10 cents for every 1,000 spam emails sent to subscribers.

The judge did not impose a fine. He gave AOL 10 days to prove its financial loss before deciding on restitution but suggested a figure of $84,000.

Smathers will surrender to a prison in Pensacola, Florida, on 19 September.