Former America Online employee Jason Smathers learned the hard way that crimes in cyberspace are real crimes as a US District Court judge sentenced him to a year and three months in prison. Smathers, a software engineer, admitted to stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses and then selling them to spammers.


Spammers sent out up to 7 billion emails thanks to Smathers’ help, an effort that earned the 25-year-old Harpers Ferry, West Virginian $28,000 for his booty. But time would tell for certain that crime doesn’t pay as the fine for his actions is now $84,000, triple his profits, and the only booty he has left will be sweating apprehensively in an 8 X 8 cell.

Reporters described Smathers as soft spoken and teary-eyed as he admitted to Judge Alvin Hellerstein, “I know I’ve done something very wrong.”

Hellerstein reduced the sentence from the minimum one and a half years because Smathers had cooperated well with the government before pleading guilty to conspiracy charges.

"Cyberspace is a new and strange place," Smathers wrote in a letter to the court. "I was good at navigating in that frontier and I became an outlaw."

The self-described outlaw used another AOL employee’s access code to steal the information in 2003. Smathers allegedly peddled the screen names and email addresses to Sean Dunaway, of Las Vegas, who spammed gambling advertisements to 30 million AOL subscribers as well as those in their address books.

Spammers are believed to be still circulating the addresses to this day, which didn’t help Smathers’ case when Hellerstein admitted in December that he dropped his AOL account because of too much spam.

Prosecutors and AOL had originally sought tougher penalties for Smathers. AOL estimated financial damages to be at least $400,000. The judge felt the number was unsubstantiated and dropped the total restitution.

It was also requested that Smathers be banned outright from his profession, but Hellerstein believed the defendant’s contrition and felt the lesson had been learned.

Hellerstein used the sentencing to admonish the public as a whole to remember that the “Internet is not lawless.”

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