AOL Employee Arrested in Spam Scheme

[giza]

http://money.cnn.com/2004/06/23/technology/aol_spam/index.htm - An Employee of America Online was charged with selling e-mail addresses of subscribers to a spammer who then spammed them with ads for his Internet gambling site.

Oh! I also forgot to mention this really cool conbadge that idigull made for me:



Yes, she takes requests.

Comments

[rigelkitty.livejournal.com]

News Google for "employee arrested". Sort it by date. There are seven other stories of employees arrested for much more severe illegal behavior. The info stolen from AOL wasn't even compromising. No passwords, no credit card numbers, no addresses, no phone numbers, no money stolen, no illegal stock manipulation. User lists are stolen on the inside from businesses all the time - how else is all that info out there beyond random-generators? I understand why it's illegal and why the guy was arrested, but I don't understand why this is such a big deal to the media. It's only news because it's AOL and people loooove to bash AOL.

[giza.livejournal.com]

No, it's news because spam is a very hot topic right now. And employees of ISPs selling off customer addresses tos spammers is a very rare thing, which makes it newsworthy.

No bashing of AOL was intended.

[rigelkitty.livejournal.com]

Rare? Haven't you seen those spam ads offering millions of verified email addresses on a CD for $49.95? They didn't pull those names out of their asses. AOL isn't the only target of spam, so the usernames of all those non-AOL addresses had to come from somewhere.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Yes, spammers get e-mail addresses from Usenet, websites, chatrooms, and pretty much any other place where e-mail addresses can be found. See also:

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/spamalrt.htm (http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/spamalrt.htm)

However, in all of those cases, the addresses were already available on the Internet somewhere. What makes this case substantially different is that the addresses came from a non-public source, the internal records at an ISP. As I said before, the situation involving an employee of an ISP doing this is the exception, not the rule, and that's why the news media picked it up.

[rigelkitty.livejournal.com]

Ok, ok, I get your logic. Just irks me that this is front page news in so many places so darn fast, a spot usually reserved for federal politics, terrorism, or murders, despite the fact that nothing of value was lost. Spam is annoying, but it's still merely a crime of annoyance.

[puctiger.livejournal.com]

You look like a fourteen year-old twink, you twink.

[was1.livejournal.com]

Cute badge, she does nice work. The coloring of the sunset works really well with it too.