Former America Online software engineer Jason Smathers has pleaded guilty to stealing 92 screen names and e-mail addresses from AOL databases to sell to spammers. The spammers in turn used the information to launch as many as 7 billion spam messages.
Smathers could receive from 18 months to two years in prison at his May 20 sentencing date, not to mention facing between $200,000 and $400,000 in restitution which the government estimated the theft and resulting spam had cost AOL.
Federal judge Alvin Hellerstein had spurned a comparable plea bargain in December because he didn't believe Smathers had actually committed a crime, but published reports indicated prosecutors convinced the judge sufficiently that a crime indeed it was.
One irony was that Hellerstein himself dropped his own AOL account – because he got too much spam.
Fired by AOL in June 2004, Smathers was accused of using another worker's access to steal the customer list from AOL's Dulles headquarters, after which he reportedly sold it to Sean Dunaway, a Las Vegas man who used the list to send millions of unwanted gambling ads to AOL subscribers. The list is still believed to be circulating among spammers, and charges remain pending against Dunaway himself.
Dunaway is believed to have run an online gambling business netting him a reported $20,000 a day, enabling him to afford paying Smathers' alleged $100,000 price for the AOL list. His attorney, Kevin Kelly, has said Dunaway ran an online marketing operation but not a gambling operation.
One of the spammers with whom Dunaway dealt in the AOL list is believed to have been a key government informant that helped capture both Smathers and Dunaway last June.
