A former AOL software engineer, Jason Smathers, was sentenced to 15 months in jail for stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses. He sold these to spammers, who sent up to 7 billion spam emails. This is about 1.07 per person on Earth.

“I know I’ve done something very wrong,” a soft-spoken and teary eyed Jason Smathers told U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein.

 This story itself has being written on S*PAM_KiNgS back in December, and information on the fact he was guilty in early February 2005 by MSNBC.

The development today is that he’s being sentenced.

The judge indicated he would be lenient towards Smathers. I’m not going to go into all the details, as you know that’s not my type of thing.

Mr Smathers admitted he accepted $28,000 (about £15,500) for giving information to someone who wanted to know AOL customer’s email addresses to send spam about an offshore gambling site. He did this knowing that these details maybe passed on to other spammers, who could use them to send spam from (very basic, no hacking required) and use them to send email solicitations to.

Prosecutors also claimed Mr Smathers breached the CAN-SPAM law.

Ironically the judge had to give up his AOL account, in December, due to the fact he was getting so much spam. To give credit to AOL, they have launched an attack on spam since, dramatically reducing the amount their customers receive.

The judge also recommended Smithers to be forced to pay $84,000 (approx. £46,500) in restitution, triple what he earned and suggested a figure of at least $400,000 (about £221,500) in damages was subjective.

Smathers was fired by AOL last June. He used another employees access codes to steal the list of AOL customers in 2003 for their headquaters in Dulles, VA.

Though I feel sorry for the Smathers over the (somewhat harsh, in my view) punishment. He’ll probably never be able to get another good paying job nor ever pay off any large fines which may come about (like the $400,000 mentioned). He deserved to be punished, but I have no problem with spammers, Gmail does a great job at blocking them. Oh, BTW if you want a Gmail invite try Bytetest.com over 8,000 invites are available, and you can add your own by simply sending them to a special address Xenolith0 (at) bytetest (dot) com (seperated to avoid spam).

Tags: AOL, american online, america online, Jason Smathers, Smathers, spam, CAN-SPAM, spammer, AOL insider, Hellerstein, illegal, outlaw, internet, email