Spammer Arrested in Seattle

May 31, 01:04 PM

Current Headlines: A man reputed to be one of the United States' most prolific purveyors of junk e-mail was arrested in Seattle Thursday on spam-related charges.

A U.S. grand jury charged Robert Alan Soloway, 27, with 35 counts of mail and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, money laundering and fraud, The Seattle Times reported.

Soloway was indicted under seal last week.

Prosecutors alleged Soloway charged customers $495 to send e-mail to 20 million addresses for 15 days or sell them 80,000 e-mail addresses to send with his software. He was accused of defrauding his customers because sometimes his software didn't work and his e-mail messages were sent with headers that masked the sender's identity and originating computer, the Times reported.

In 2005, Microsoft sued Soloway for sending spam that looked like it came from Microsoft-owned MSN and Hotmail servers and an Oklahoma man won a $10 million default judgment from him for violating anti-spam laws.