Spamming can pay big bucks, but it hasn't paid off for a Seattle man who was once considered the eighth-largest spammer in the world by Spamhaus. Robert Soloway, 28, pleaded guilty to electronic mail fraud, "snail" mail fraud, and not filing a tax return in 2005—when he reportedly made over $300,000 from his spamming activities.

Soloway was originally hit with a 35-count indictment in May 2007 charging him with fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering. He was accused of using Chinese ISPs to send out spam e-mail using a database of 157.8 million e-mail addresses, as well as operating a botnet used for spamming. He faced significant jail time and the prospect of having to forfeit all of his spam-related assets to the federal government.

Soloway is no stranger to legal actions related to his illicit e-mail activities. He was sued by Microsoft in December 2003, but argued that his subcontractors were actually responsible for the spam that used forged hotmail.com reply-to addresses. In April 2005, a judge handed down a default judgment in Microsoft's favor, much to Soloway's chagrin.

A month later, Soloway formed SPAMIS: Strategic Partnership Against Microsoft Illegal Spam. A press release archived in a USENET group announced the organization's formation to alert everyone of "Microsoft's illegal, unsolicited, unethical, and fraudulent unsolicited e-mail spamming, e-mail address harvesting and e-mail list purchasing for use in spamming and various other reckless spamming related practices that everyone from the Microsoft CEO to Microsoft employees have engaged in for over 10 years now." SPAMIS threatened to bombard over 1.9 billion e-mail accounts with data the group reportedly obtained on "Microsoft's spamming practices."

The legal problems continued to mount for Soloway, who was sued by an Oklahoma ISP in 2005 for violating federal CAN-SPAM laws. Soloway fired his lawyer and eventually stopped showing up in court. As a result, the federal judge overseeing the case handed the ISP a $10 million default judgment.

Soloway has been jailed since being arrested, and it doesn't look as though he'll be seeing anything besides the inside of a prison cell for the foreseeable future. He's looking at a maximum of 26 years in prison as well as $625,000 fine. In addition, the government will move to seize his ill-gotten gains. His attorney told The Seattle Times that there's not much left to seize, saying that he's essentially broke.

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