Howard Carmack, the notorious “Buffalo Spammer,” has been sentenced to between three-and-a-half and seven years in prison for using EarthLink’s network to send hundreds of millions of spam messages and stealing the identities of two area residents to do it.
Carmack is said to be the first convicted under New York’s state identity theft law. He was convicted by an Erie County jury April 1, in a case that began in May 2003, when investigators from state attorney general Eliot Spitzer’s office, the FBI, and the New York State Police helped to nab Carmack with EarthLink’s cooperation.
That was after Carmack lost a civil case, EarthLink winning a $16 million judgment against him. EarthLink has since acted aggressively, in and out of court, to stop and prosecute spammers.
“The guilty verdict rendered by the jury in this case shows that those engaged in identity theft and cyber-crime will be discovered, prosecuted, and convicted of their crimes,” Spitzer said, following Carmack’s conviction.
Carmack got the maximum allowable sentence under the New York identity theft law. Carmack had been convicted previously for fraud involving fake money orders.
