NY spammer hit with 30-month prison sentence

By Dawn Kawamoto, CNET Wed Jul 16, 10:17 AM ET

A federal court on Tuesday sentenced a New York man to a 30-month prison term for sending unsolicited marketing e-mail to 1.2 million AOL subscribers, according to a Reuters report.

The court ordered Adam Vitale, 27, to also pay restitution of $180,000 to the Time Warner unit for violating federal antispam laws.

In 2005, Brooklyn resident Vitale and another man, Todd Moeller of New Jersey, cut a deal with a government informant to send junk e-mails that advertised a security computer program to nearly 1.3 million AOL subscriber addresses. Under that deal, the two men were to receive 50 percent of the product's proceeds.

The two men avoided detection of AOL's spam filter system through the use of several servers to relay and change the e-mail header information.

Moeller was sentenced to 27 months in jail last November.