A man known as the king of spam was in federal jail Thursday facing numerous charges for surreptitiously taking over thousands of personal computers and using them to bombard millions of inboxes with with unwanted e-mail marketing messages, according to dpa. Robert Soloway, 27, is facing 31 counts of fraud, wire fraud, e- mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering. Federal prosecutors are also demanding that Soloway, who ran Newport Internet Marketing Corp, return 772,998 dollars, which represents the proceeds of his activity, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. Soloway was arrested on Wednesday and could face decades in jail if found guilty. In a 24-page indictment filed in the US District Court for the District of Washington, US Attorney Jeffrey C Sullivan said Soloway has been operating his illegal scheme since November 2003. He has sent out tens of millions of spam e-mails in an effort to drum up business for his e-mail advertising software, which in turn would send out additional spam. At an arraignment, Soloway pleaded not guilty to all charges and was ordered held until a hearing on Monday. Soloway had been at the top of the most wanted list of the anti- spam organization Spamhaus.org, which welcomed the arrest Thursday. "Soloway has been a long term nuisance on the Internet," the organization said. "He has been sending enormous amounts of spam for years, filling mailboxes and mail servers with unsolicited and unwanted junk email. In addition, he has fraudulently marketed his spam services to others as legitimate 'opt-in' services when they were anything but that, duping innocent users and then failing to provide promised customer support or refunds." "It's good news for consumers," said John Levine, a board member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (CAUCE). "Soloway has been taunting the anti-spam community and federal officials for years, essentially daring them to come after him, and they finally did."
