AOL employee colludes with spammers
AOL victim of inside job.
An AOL employee was arrested last month and charged with selling the company's customer email list to spammers.
24-year-old AOL engineer Jason Smathers is accused of stealing at least 92 million screen names from AOL's database and
selling the information to an associate, 21-year-old email marketer Sean Dunaway.
Dunaway, who was also arrested, is
accused both of using the screen names to promote his own business and of selling the information on to other spammers
- an initial list for $52,000 and a subsequent updated list for $32,000.
AOL said it discovered the theft during an investigation it carried out as part of legal action the company was taking
against another large-scale spammer earlier this year.
A statement from the company read: "We deeply regret what has taken place and are thoroughly reviewing and
strengthening our internal procedures as a result of this investigation and arrest."
The news comes only shortly after AOL - as one of the members of the Anti-Spam Technical Alliance -
put forward a joint proposal aimed at reducing spam, which
stated that spam cannot be stopped unless ISPs take responsibility for the problem.
The Alliance recommends that all ISPs should run spam filters on outbound mail and prevent their customers from sending
out more than 500 messages per day, or 100 per hour. Any suspicious accounts, the Alliance says, should be suspended
immediately (as, one assumes, should employees found to be in cahoots with spammers).
8 July 2004
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