June 18th, 2007Is Your Inbox Empty, Too?
On May 30th of this year, one of the ten biggest spam artists in the world was arrested in Seattle. One week after being indicted by a grand jury in Washington, and charged with fraud, money laundering, identity theft, and breaking Federal anti-spam legislation, Robert Alan Soloway was taken into custody. Soloway’s arrest followed a large joint investigation by the Washington State Attorney General’s Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Internal Revenue Service Department of Criminal Investigations (IRS-CI), and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS).
Is this why my inboxes have been relatively empty for the last few weeks?
Just a month ago I would receive at least two dozen emails a day promising such things as Viagra, hair growth treatments, pre-approved $700,000 mortgages for ridiculously low rates, and a plethora of other products and services in an effort to lure my dollars. I would often also recieve at least one email claiming to be from some bank or PayPal saying that my account had been put on hold due to “suspicious activity” in an effort to get my personal data recorded on some site in Russia or other unregulated Asian nation.
But all these have stopped. Since Soloway’s arrest, I have received less than 30 spam emails with my five accounts.
Soloway has been a colossal Internet pest for years, sending giant amounts of spam, filling mailboxes and mail servers to overflowing with unsolicited and unwanted junk email. Criminally, he fraudulently marketed spam services as legitimate ‘opt-in’ services, fooling innocent users and then offering no customer support or refunds. Soloway used hijacked computers and open proxies,and therefore repeatedly violated the Computer Abuse and Fraud Act of 1984 and the CAN-SPAM law of 2003. But is it possible he’s been the primary source of the emails reaching me?
I still get those messages from some African nation asking my assistance in unlocking a few million dollars and offering a small cut in return, but even these have slowed down. Perhaps the arrest of this one man has scared some of the others into hiding.
Well done, America. Ted Stevens must be proud. 
[...] guess it was a bit premature for me to congratulate the US for the arrest of Robert Alan Soloway. Between Friday and today (late Monday), I have received an incredible 177 spam emails. The [...]