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Spam King Busted by Secret Service

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tue Feb 28, 2006 10:30 AM
from the we're-going-to-have-to-ask-you-to-come-with-us dept.
Spam
An anonymous reader writes "Adam Vitale, aka Batch1 aka Baxter, 25, of Boynton Beach, FL, and his partner Todd Moeller, aka M3rk, of New Jersey, are accused of sending nearly 50,000 pieces of spam e-mail to more than 1.2 million AOL subscribers. US Secret Service agents used a confidential informant to hire Moeller and Vitale to deliver spam, which advertised a computer security product."
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story

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[+] "Spam King" Pleads Guilty in U.S. Federal Court 238 comments
Monty writes "It looks like 'Spam King' Adam Vitale has finally plead guilty to violation of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 in federal court in New York City. 'The indictment said that in less than a week in August 2005, Vitale and Moeller sent e-mails on behalf of the informant to more than 1,277,000 addresses of subscribers at AOL, the online division of Time Warner Inc. Vitale will be sentenced on September 13 when he faces a maximum sentence of 11 years in prison. Moeller, who lives in New Jersey, faces the same charge.' We discussed Vitale's arrest back in February."
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  • Mugshot (Score:5, Informative)

    by XorNand (517466) * on Tuesday February 28 2006, @10:31AM (#14816771)
    The poor (rich?) sap's booking photo [pbso.org], complete with ::gulp:: his address. Too bad spammers aren't required to disclose their email address on arrest.
  • I wonder why illegal spamming comes under the jurisdiction of the Secret Service and not the FBI. This is not a treasury matter after all.

    • Re:Secret Service? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TripMaster Monkey (862126) * on Tuesday February 28 2006, @10:35AM (#14816822)

      Check here [treas.gov] to see all the duties of the Secret Service....among them, you will find:

      • Investigating credit and debit card fraud, computer fraud, and electronic fund transfer fraud

          • Re:Illegal? (Score:3, Informative)

            by AJWM (19027)
            It's trespass on the bot computers. As soon as they're used to send email claiming to be from elsewhere, that's fraud. Stealing a checkbook is simple theft, writing checks with it is fraud.

  • Oohhhh! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pig Hogger (10379) <pig.hoggerNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday February 28 2006, @10:33AM (#14816796) Homepage Journal
    It must have really felt good for the agents to hear the sound of a spammer squealing!!!

    It is about time that the authorities are starting to take a harder look at those thieves of computer ressources. I'm not only talking about the criminal botnet operators, but the "mainsleaze" spam senders.

    But the true way of fighting spam is not nuking spammers per se, but rather nuking ISPs who cater to spammers, in any way, be it domain registrations, DNS service and plain web-hosting, both legit and botnets. This will make them think twice in not having a good, hard look at their abuses@* mailboxen.

    • How are US authorities going to "nuke" Chinese and Brazilian ISPs? Or were you thinking of using real nukes?
    • I'd prefer to see them go after the businesses that hire them. Paying someone to break the law is also a crime. Cut off their cash flow. It is a lot harder to hide a business with a product and a credit card contract vs a box connected to the net.
      • Clueless coward wrote:
        So where exactly is the "theft" occurring. I see violation of TOS, and being a general nuisance, but no theft occurred as nothing physical was taken.
        Theft of bandwidth, theft of processor cycles, theft of computer storate, theft of time to sort out the spam and "just fucking pressing delete".

        Theft. The good old deprivation of something you enjoy by an unauthorized party.

        More clueful, now???

      • Re:Oohhhh! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Pig Hogger (10379) <pig.hoggerNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday February 28 2006, @11:31AM (#14817372) Homepage Journal
        So, let us say I am a spammer. And I pay an ISP company to host my mail, etc. And then I pay another company for DNS. Then I start mass-mailing - how is the ISP supposed to know I am doing illegal spam? How do they know my lists are not legitimate spam lists? They really can't. You hit the spammers - they are the only ones who know for sure if what they are doing is legal or not legal.
        The ISP knows because he is getting zillions of spam complaints by people you are sending your shit to.

        There is no such thing as a legitimate "spam list". Spam lists are **ALWAYS** full of unwitting recipients. Legitimate mailing-lists, on the other hand, only have addresses of people who have specifically requested to be included in **YOUR** (and YOURS alone - there is no such thing as a "legitimate" purchased list, because the people there HAVE NOT requested to be on it) mailing list.

        They know that your lists are legitimate mailing lists because every single person on them have requested to be on them, and for the eventual complaint that seeps through, you can PROVE that the person has requested to be on it, because you have DUTIFULLY kept the actual request ON FILE.

          • Even used MSDN-AA? It and many other services want an email address to sign up, and then will start with the box "Send me a buncha stuff in email" checked, which is pretty abhorrent.

            Caveat emptor. This is what disposable e-mails are for...

            Google is perfect, because the addresses are "plussed [claws-and-paws.com]", so you can add a special code ("pig.hogger+bullshit@gmail.com") to tag where you give your e-mail to, and if you see different junk coming in, you know very well who's the sleazy fucker who sold your e-mail. At th

  • Always happy to hear about a spammer being busted, but why does this land in the Secret Service's turf?
    • Always happy to hear about a spammer being busted, but why does this land in the Secret Service's turf?

      My god, how many people are gonna ask that? Look, the Secret Service isn't just the president's bodyguard. They are the law enforcement arm of the US Treasury Department. Remember Elliot Ness, of "The Untouchables" fame? Treasury agent. The Secret Service investigates a lot of things, including credit card fraud and computer crimes.

  • Services rendered (Score:3, Insightful)

    by slashnutt (807047) on Tuesday February 28 2006, @10:35AM (#14816820) Journal
    US Secret Service agents used a confidential informant to hire Moeller

    I guess it is good that the Secret Service doesn't have to worry about entrapment rules. It's great to hear that spam is getting wiped out but at what cost - the government is now hiring people to do things that will get them dragged into court? Maybe if everyone (including you, everyone you know and the government) stopped hiring/buying the service then maybe I might receive a little less spam and that is the only way it will really cease being a problem.

    • You don't understand what "entrapment" means. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NDPTAL85 (260093) on Tuesday February 28 2006, @10:39AM (#14816862)
      Entrapment means causing someone to do something they would not normally do in order to get them to break the law. This "service" that the spammers were offering was their daily business. It was their regular mode of operation. All the Secret Service did was send an informant in undercover to pose as a customer. Thus there was no entrapment, this is basic policework.
      • I dunno about that. It says that they paid an up front fee of 6500$ so that the *spammers* could buy the equipment necessary to spam. One would think if they did this for a living they'd already have plenty of equipment or botnets in place.

        By no means am I trying to say it's ok to spam, just trying to point out perhaps we shouldn't drop the guillotine before we know both sides of the story.
      • From TFA Moeller charged the informant $6,500 so that he and Vitale could buy the computer equipment to send the junk mail, court documents show.

        Hmm dosn't sound like his regular mode of operation...
      • "All the Secret Service did was send an informant in undercover to pose as a customer."

        It sounds like they did more than just posing as customers. Regardless, the moment they made an offer of cash for criminal services, they were entrapping -- inciting crime, creating criminals.

        "This 'service' that the spammers were offering was their daily business. It was their regular mode of operation."

        If that was a certainty, there would have been enough evidence to convict them already. I hate spam as much as the next
        • If the spammers offered a service, asked for money for it, and the SS then gave it to them, there's no entrapment. In fact, they'd need to complete the transaction to prove something illegal was going on. It's not illegal to talk about selling drugs, or spamming or whatever, it's illegal to actually sell those things. If you've ever watched one of those undercover cop shows, you'll notice they always actually make a buy before arresting a suspect. Otherwise, nothing illegal has happened.

          You'll also notice t
    • Imagine if local police tried this!

      Problem: Sex offender released from prison
      Step 1: Distribute local elementary school address list
      Step 2: ???
      Step 3: Profit! (well, send him back to jail at least)
    • ... the government is now hiring people to do things that will get them dragged into court?

      What, like that's some kind of new development? Do you not read the news?

      • I never believed in Entrapment. It's one thing to say "steal this money or I'll kill you" but "come on, no one is looking!" is not significant pressure.

        You got the wrong idea. The point is not if the person entrapped is a crook who only needs a big enough lure or not, the point is that the law enforcement is not supposed to be actively promoting and encouraging crime. It also is an easy cop-out for them as instead of catching crooks which commited crimes against citizens, now they create their own, thus in

          • Nobody could pressure me into doing something like mass piracy (...err.. copyright violations) or spamming or theft without threat of harm or violence. Heck, I have a chance to not file some money I made as a "sole prop." in Canada last year. I could save $4,000 if I did that. My friends even suggest it wouldn't be noticed. I'm just not stupid enough to do that. I pay the 4K I should pay anyways and I don't run the risk of being caught, convicted and then seriously hampered (e.g. international travel). I g
  • Unfortunately another will just take their place. We need technology to stop Spam. Human nature being what it is will continue where ever there is a buck to be made.
  • So did each person get 0.333~ spam then? How exactly does that work...

    AOL subscriber #1: Buy our very high
    AOL subscriber #2: quality and cheap
    AOL subscriber #2: viagra product! http:
    AOL subscriber #4: //wwww.viagra-products
    AOL subscriber #5: .com

    Damn those evil geniuses!
  • I guess he wasn't making a ton of money off of spamming, because I live only a few miles from that location.... That isn't a very nice neighborhood. Definitely not something my wife would want to move to.

    I thought spammers were supposed to be living the lush life on our nickel.
    • I guess he wasn't making a ton of money off of spamming, because I live only a few miles from that location.... That isn't a very nice neighborhood. Definitely not something my wife would want to move to.
      Congratulations: you have run accross your first chickenboner [google.com]!!!
  • Doesn't make sense. Sending 50K emails I get. 1.2M subscribers I get, but how can you send 50K emails to 1.2M accounts? 50K to each? 50K split between them? That's like 0.042 emails each.

    • For the sake of the demonstration, I'll pick smaller numbers. Send 2 messages to 5 persons, A, B, C, D, E.

      1) Send message #1 to A, B, C.
      2) Send message #2 to C, D, E.

      It is not said that all 1.5M people received each of the 50k messages.

      In spam emails, the From: and To: fields are often erroneous. In that case, the actual recipients are in the Bcc field. So, several people receive a same message that seems addressed to only one.

      Other comment:
      50k distinct emails to a total of 1.5M people [slashdot.org]
  • ... The Secret Service also investigates violations of laws relating to counterfeiting of obligations and securities of the United States; financial crimes that include, but are not limited to, access device fraud, financial institution fraud, identity theft, computer fraud; and computer-based attacks on our nation's financial, banking, and telecommunications infrastructure.

    and also

    Since 1984, our investigative responsibilities have expanded to include crimes that involve financial institution fraud, computer and telecommunications fraud, false identification documents, access device fraud, advance fee fraud, electronic funds transfers, and money laundering as it relates to our core violations.

    These guys are spammers. If they've advertised p3nis enlargement pills, they've committed fraud and, according to the Secret Service they have jurisdiction over this area. Disclaimer: IANAL

    Read for yourself: http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/mission.shtml [ustreas.gov]

  • Article is on Spam Daily News, sources listed are: TheSpamDiaries.blogspot.com; Sun Sentinel; ROKSO.

    Sounds like total bull to me, Why wasn't this picked up by any real news sources? And since when does the secret service care about spam?
  • So if you send 500,000 E-mails to 1,200,000 poor soules living in AOhell, would that mean that each one got 0.0417 E-mails from these 2 people?
  • I can't believe anyone gets any spam anymore. I actually feel sort of nostalgic for all of the strange offers.

    What's next? Secret Service going to bust up a bunch of bolshevics?

    Actually they probably should, all of the good spam came from communist countries anyways who were probably just sending it to thumb their nose at our freedom of speech and our weight and erectile problems.

    Lousy communists!
  • How do you send 50,000 spam emails to 1.2 million people? Or were they sending 50,000 mail messages to EACH person?
    • 50,000 different messages & variations sent to 1.2 million people. Perhaps they could actually have gotten thousands of different messages each, meaning possibly billions of individual spams?

  • I'm smiling as I picture: (Score:4, Funny)

    by Hosiah (849792) on Tuesday February 28 2006, @10:51AM (#14816962)
    our new hero in a jail cell with a bunch of cell mates who have all enlarged their penis, ordered Viagra, and are looking for a new relationship.
  • I want to see Scott Richter in the headline. I've never heard of these other two people. Were they small-time spammers or would-be spammers that were essentially entrapped into the game? They were given more than $6,000 initially to purchase equipment. This suggests to me that perhaps these guys weren't already equiped to do the deed. What if a cop sold a gun to a potential bank robber and then later arrested the same guy for armed robbery?

    I have to wonder how shaky the case here might be.
  • Anyone else understand how they sent 50,000 emails to 1,200,000 people?

    Each person got 0.0416 emails?

    Or did they mean that 50,000 emails were sent to each of the 1,200,000 people? That'd be 60,000,000,000 emails total...

    Am I just missing something here or is there some stupidity going on with these numbers.... Artifically making the numbers seem big by including the number of AOL subscribers?
    • "I mean 50,000 pieces of spam to nearly 1.2 million AOL users, that's less than .05 penis enlargements per person, pathetic. I've gained greater coverage via semaphore."

      I think you'll find that's 50,000 pieces of spam (or part of that 50k) to each of the 1.2 million mail boxes - otherwise it'd be 50,000 pieces of spam to 50,000 mail boxes! (or was that intended solely as a [bad] joke?)
    • The Secret Service was created in 1865 in order to combat counterfeit currency. They expanded to include fraud against the government just a few years later.

      The Secret Service didn't have anything to do with protecting the President until 1894, and that wasn't actually official until 1902.

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