Latest Spam King Under Arrest

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

If you have ever heard of Robert Alan Soloway, and looking at a Google search for his name, lots of you probably have, you’ll be happy to know that he is under arrest after a jury returned a 35-count indictment against Soloway charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.

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.

The online empire was run from Soloway’s high-end, Harbor Steps apartment on the Seattle waterfront, investigators said. Wednesday, he appeared in court unshaven, wearing loafers with no socks, to hear Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Warma announce that if he’s found guilty of the fraud, money laundering and identity theft charges in the 35-count indictment, he could spend decades behind bars.

“The amount of damage he does to the Internet — the fraud thing to innocent people who think they’re hiring some Internet person — is awful,” said John Reid, a volunteer with The Spamhaus Project, an anti-spam group.

He said Soloway preyed on computer-gullible business owners who thought they were hiring a legitimate company to help increase traffic to their Web sites — only to discover that Soloway sent waves of spam in their name. Source: Seattlepi.com

We Say: Woo hoo, another dirt bag bites the dust. What’s funny is he was using a public defender in his hearing and the judge told him that even though the government has seized four of his bank accounts, he was still able to pay for his defense. Anybody feel sorry for him?