After a year, the law finally caught up with this master spammer.  Now if
they can do something about the phony business proposals from Nigeria I
get in my inbox twice a day.

Kelly


The Wall Street Journal
May 15, 2003


    Earthlink 'Buffalo Spammer' Arrested, Charged in New York

    By JULIA ANGWIN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

    In one of the first criminal cases against a spammer, the New York
attorney general's office arrested Howard Carmack, a Buffalo, N.Y.,
resident who allegedly sent millions of unsolicited commercial e-mails
known as spam.

    In a complaint filed in Buffalo City Court, the prosecutors charged
that Mr. Carmack used false identities to illegally set up Internet
accounts and send out spam. Mr. Carmack, 36 years old, was arrested and
arraigned on charges of forgery and identity theft before a state-court
judge in Buffalo on Tuesday. Mr. Carmack pleaded not guilty, and bail
was set at $20,000.

    "We have not criminalized the mere sending of an unsolicited
e-mail," New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said in an interview.
"But when you have the identity theft and the forgeries as well, you
clearly have criminal conduct."

    Prosecutors said that if convicted, Mr. Carmack, as a second-time
felon, could face a maximum of seven years in prison. Authorities said
Mr. Carmack was convicted in 1996 of bank fraud in U.S. District Court
for the Western District of New York. For that offense, he was sentenced
to one year in prison and three years of supervised release.

    The Atlanta-based Internet provider EarthLink Inc. first brought Mr.
Carmack to prosecutors' attention nearly a year ago, when it began
hunting for the culprit behind some of the spam -- which advertised for
everything from cable descramblers to herbal remedies -- flooding its
system. EarthLink's difficulties in tracking down Mr. Carmack were the
subject of a page-one article in the May 7 edition of The Wall Street
Journal.

    Stephen Kline, an assistant attorney general in New York, said he
and his team worked with EarthLink throughout its investigation.

    Last week, EarthLink won a $16.4 million judgment in federal court
against Mr. Carmack for criminally trespassing on its computer network.
EarthLink said in its complaint that Mr. Carmack had created 343 false
identities to set up EarthLink accounts and had used those accounts to
send 825 million spam e-mails during the past year.

    Write to Julia Angwin at
[log in to unmask]


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html