14 DAY TRIAL // Today, a sentence will be issued in the case of Robert Alan Soloway, aka the Spam King, who is charged with single counts of mail and e-mail fraud and tax evasion. Soloway has already pleaded guilty as charged and risks spending the next 25 years in jail (20 for mail fraud and 5 for e-mail fraud) as well as paying a fine that can range from $400,000 to $1 million (as the prosecution asked).
It seems that for a period of about ten years, from October 1997 until May 2007, Soloway marketed spamming tools through the company he ran, Newport Internet Marketing. The company sold e-mail spamming services as well as spamming software solutions. For as little as $195 the customer was reassured that the spam message would reach 2 million inboxes over a period of 15 days. If you wanted to reach ten times more people in the same amount of time, the price would go up to $495. Soloway also provided a data base of more than 150 million e-mail addresses so that the customer could better determine who would get the spam message.
Richard Troberman, Soloway's attorney comments: "Without question Mr. Soloway has been a nuisance to Internet users, but the court should keep his offense in perspective. What he did was send huge amounts of e-mail over the Internet advertising his product and service, often using forged headers to people who did not want to receive it." According to him, Soloway should spend at most 24 months in incarceration, because this is a simple spam case and under the CAN-SPAM Act the defendant can get a maximum sentence of 5 years.
Other info should be taken into consideration, such as the fact that Soloway suffers from Tourette Syndrome, Attention Deficit Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder which cause him to have an "erratic and anti-social behavior", says Troberman.