Hellenic Forums Omogenia - YASOU - Hellenism: AOL WORKER STEALS, SELLS NAMES

June 24, 2004 -- In one of the biggest spam scams ever uncovered, an AOL software engineer stole 92 million screen names from the online giant and sold them for $52,000 to spammers who flooded millions of customers with junk e-mail, federal officials said yesterday.
Jason Smathers, 24, an AOL software engineer from West Virginia, allegedly used a stolen ID code in the spring of 2003 to break into the company's central "Data Warehouse," where he got the screen names for a huge chunk of the company's 30 million subscribers, according to federal documents.

Smathers sold the list to reputed spammer Sean Dunaway, 21, a Las Vegas man who runs an on-line gambling site, authorities said.

After using the 92-mil- lion strong list to promote his gambling site, Dunaway allegedly sold the names to another spammer who used them to market herbal penile-enlargement pills, federal documents said.

Smathers also allegedly sold a second, updated list to Dunaway for $100,000, which Dunaway again resold to the penile-enlargement hawker.

"We deeply regret what has taken place," said AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham. "We are absolutely committed to pursuing spammers wherever they operate or where we find them."

Smathers and Dunaway are among the first people prosecuted under the so-called CAN-SPAM law that went into effect in January in an effort to crack down on Internet spammers.

The pair face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for their alleged spam plot.

The theft of the screen names was uncovered in March. AOL investigators said they found correspondence between Smathers and another individual in which the software engineer said he was ready to grab the screen names from the database, to which he had no legal access.

"I got it figured out," he allegedly wrote in the seized e-mail. "There are going to be millions of them so, [all errors sic] will take time to extract I will do them a chunk at a time . . . because 37 million accounts have up to seven screen names per account I'd expect there to be around 100 million active screen names, maybe more."

Smathers eventually got 92 million screen names.

Dunaway appeared in a Las Vegas court and was given 30 days to appear before a judge in New York. Smathers was ordered held by an Alexandria, Va., court until a hearing scheduled for today in Manhattan.

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