Back at the Hall of Justice

Robert Alan Soloway, a 27 year old spammer was arrested Wednesday and is accused of sending billions and billions, in my best Carl Sagan voice, of spam emails using botnets, networks of compromised computers. A Microsoft lawyer said he was one of the top 10 spammers in the world and had become a huge problem for companies everywhere. Soloway preyed on gullible business owners who thought he would increase traffic to their Web sites, but he just sent waves of spam in their name. It has been said that 80% of Internet traffic is spam, and Soloway had a large hand in it.

A federal grand jury last week returned a 35-count indictment against Soloway charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.

Soloway pleaded not guilty Wednesday afternoon to all charges after a judge determined that — even with four bank accounts seized by the government — he was sufficiently well off to pay for his own lawyer.

He has been living in a ritzy apartment and drives an expensive Mercedes convertible, said prosecutor Kathryn Warma. Prosecutors are seeking to have him forfeit $773,000 they say he made from his business, Newport Internet Marketing Corp. Source: Man described as a top spammer arrested

He was sued by Microsoft in 2003 for sending emails containing false header information, making the emails look like they came from MSN and Hotmail addresses, and was convicted, which didn’t even slow him down.

Here are some other interesting links and websites that talk about Soloway, just so you know, this is not one of those innocent until proven guilty things, he is a dirt bag. Spamhaus Information on Soloway, Answers.com, a website bearing his name gives lots of info about him and his activities here, a great page chock full of info here and lots more info at http://www.solowaysucks.net/.

See ya later dirt bag.

Added: The Seattle Post Intelligencer article adds:

One expert estimated that the man agents dubbed the “Spam King” when they arrested him Wednesday sent billions, perhaps even tens of billions, of e-mails a day.

On just two groups of servers, in just a few months, federal investigators found more than 200 million spam messages linked to 27-year-old Robert Soloway.

Neil Schwartzman, the executive director for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, an anti-spam group, said that Soloway not only spammed people, but targeted anti-spammers with “mail bombings.” Source: ‘Spam King’ suspect seized