NY man guilty of spamming AOL users
A Brooklyn man pleaded guilty on Monday to sending spam e-mails to more than 1.2 million subscribers of America Online in a scheme that foiled the internet company's spam-filtering system.
Adam Vitale, 26, pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to breaking anti-spam laws. He was caught making a deal with a government informant that sent spam e-mails advertising a computer security programme in return for 50 percent of the product's profits, prosecutors said.
According to prosecutors, Vitale and another man, Todd Moeller, defeated AOL's filter system by using several different computer servers to relay the e-mails and changed the e-mail header information to ensure the spam e-mails could not be traced back to them.