05/15/05

Spammer in the Slammer
By Alan Luber

I don't know about you, but this happens to me all the time. A spammer forges my email address (ah, the price of fame) as a return address when he sends a spam message to millions of people. Angry people reply asking me to remove them from my list, even though I was not the spammer.

Yesterday, a man was arrested in Buffalo, New York, and charged with forgery and fraud in connection with having sent millions of spam messages. Here is the really delicious part. New York doesn't have a law against sending spam, but it does have a law against identify theft. The man is being charged with a felony because he forged other people's email address as the reply-to address on his spam messages, a common technique among spammers as I mentioned earlier.

It took police and Internet Service Providers more than a year to track down the man, known to police as "the Buffalo spammer", who was previously indicted as a John Doe defendant.

Like all of you, I believe in our system of justice: innocent until proven guilty. However, If this person is found guilty of spamming millions of people and using people like you and me as his return address foils, he deserves a slow painful death.

 

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