KEY POINTS:
Now that one of America's most-wanted spammers, Robert Soloway, has been arrested, it will be interesting to see if he turns informant on his fellow spammers in the US and abroad.
Soloway may consider doing so, because for his alleged spamming he faces decades
of prison time for charges including mail fraud, wire fraud, email fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. If he can help take down at least one kingpin on the top-10 list of spammers kept by spam watch group Spamhaus , the world's email inboxes will be clearer for it.
Soloway himself was considered to be among the top 20 spammers.The top 10 list includes four operating in Russia, two in Ukraine, and one each in the US, Israel, Hong Kong and Australia. Nikhil Kumar Pragi is allegedly operating from Queensland and according to Spamhaus, " through the Dark-Mailer Windows based proxy-botnet based spamware, this spammer is responsible for and behind a large portion of the world's illegally send [sic] spam". Who knows where these people actually are, they tend to move around.
Soloway (27) accumulated serious wealth spamming after starting out in the business as a teenager. His story reminds me of meeting our own uber-spammer, Captain Bob , who in 2003 at age 19 was pulling $1200 a day sending out millions of spam messages on behalf of spam agents based overseas. A computer geek, Captain Bob seemed more interested in the mechanics of spamming than in making a fortune from it, though he did show me how he was able to use a PayPal account to receive payment from his spam master.
"I just want to make enough to be able to do my own thing most of the time. I only started this a few months ago and it has all really come together," he told me.
Captain Bob no longer appears to be in business and I doubt there are any major spam agents operating locally, though legitimate companies are regularly crossing the line in sending out unsolicited email.
According to Spamhaus, the US, China and Russia are the top three originators of spam, the latter two of which are still in the "Wild West" category when it comes to enforcement. For that reason, we'll be continued to be plagued by spam for some time to come. But it's nice to know Soloway's penthouse apartment in Seattle lies empty today, his high-end BMW sits unused, his Armani watch seized by police and most importantly, his internet connection is finally unplugged.