And Now Some Good News . . .

Todd Moeller and Adam Vitale will join the short list of individuals who know what it feels like to be sentenced under the CAN-SPAM Act. The two were part of an online spam gang that called themselves the "g00dfellas", where Vitale went by the handle "Batch1" or "n1Hustler4Life", while Moeller called himself "Trill".

Before the period of time in question (April 2005 to August 2005) Moeller claimed to be in control of 35,000 spam-sending proxies, which he could use to hide the true origins of his email. He boasted that he could send millions of spam messages per hour. In the operation which ended in their arrest, for a $1,500 payment, and the promise of 50% of eventual sales of an imaginary anti-spyware software product, AOL intercepted 1,277,401 spam messages which had been sent from 73 unique IP addresses


Moeller was sentenced today after Pleading Guilty on June 20, 2007 to

conspir[ing] with VITALE to send spam e-mails to AOL subscribers, and sent spam e-mails to AOL subscribers using techniques to hide the spam e-mails’ true origin, including the use of computers to relay and retransmit the spam e-mails and altering the spam e-mails’ header information.

Although the DOJ Press Release of the guilty plea indicated that Moeller could have received 11 years sentence, he got off with the relatively light sentence of 27 months in prison. While boasting of his spamming to the potential customer, who turned out to be a Secret Service Confidential Informant, Moeller claimed he was earning $40,000 per month by sending spam that attempted to manipulate the values of certain stocks. In this case, Moeller agreed to spam the CI's product for a 50% take on the sales.

In Adam Vitale's Guilty Plea it says that:

Forensic examination of the spam e-mails indicated that VITALE and MOELLER used two
different techniques to conceal from the recipients the source of the spam e-mails and allow VITALE and MOELLER to continue their illegal activity: (1) VITALE and MOELLER used computers connected to the Internet to relay or re-transmit the spam e-mails to make it look like the spam came from those computers, and not ones
that could be traced to VITALE and MOELLER; and (2) VITALE and MOELLER altered the header information in their spam e-mails to make it appear the spam e-mails came from a sender other than VITALE and MOELLER.

Vitale is scheduled to be sentenced on November 13th.