p2pnet.net News:- A “soft-spoken and teary eyed” Jason Smathers, the ex-AOL employee who admits he stole, and then sold, 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses, admitted he’d done something “very wrong”.

He “apologized for a theft that resulted in spammers sending out up to 7 billion unsolicited e-mails,” says the Associated Press.

Smathers had already pleaded guilty to conspiracy in a plea deal which called for a sentence of at least 18 months in jail, says the story, going on that in a letter to the court, he said:

"Cyberspace is a new and strange place. I was good at navigating in that frontier and I became an outlaw."

US district judge Alvin Hellerstein sentenced Smathers to a year and three months saying leniency was appropriate for, "someone who tries hard to bare his soul but doesn’t have the information the government needs”.

Hellerstein recommended that Smathers be forced to pay $84,000 in restitution, triple what he earned and, “delayed the order to let AOL prove the damages were higher,” says AP. “The judge suggested the $300,000 damage figure was speculative.”

The 92 million AOL addresses for AOL’s estimated 30 million customers are believed to be still circulating among spammers, says AP, adding:

“The judge refused a Probation Department recommendation that Smathers be banned from his profession as a software engineer, saying he trusted Smathers had learned his lesson.”

Other defendants in spam cases have received tougher sentences, says silicom.com.

"Last year, a New York state man known as the ‘Buffalo Spammer’ was sentenced to between three and a half and seven years in prison for violating state forgery and identity-theft laws" but, "Smathers co-operated with prosecutors".

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See:-
Associated Press – AOL worker who stole e-mail list sentenced, August 17, 2005
silicom.com – AOL email thief gets 15 month jail term, August 18, 2005

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