825 Million junk e-mails, 343 stolen IDs, make a few thou; lose big
 

This is a pretty big landmark case against a spammer.
Sure he didn't hit the big billion mark but he got damn close.
What a loser...
.......................

(Albany, NY, May 14, 2003 -AP) - - A man accused of sending more than 825 million junk e-mail messages and thwarting attempts to stop him by using stolen identities was arrested, New York's attorney general said Wednesday.

Howard Carmack, 36, was arrested at his Buffalo home Tuesday and remained jailed after failing to post $20,000 bail, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said. Carmack was arraigned before Buffalo City Court Judge Diane Devlin and pleaded innocent to the charges. He is due back in court on Monday.

Carmack is accused of stealing the identity of two Buffalo-area residents to open accounts with Internet service provider EarthLink. He was charged with forgery, criminal possession of a forgery device, falsifying business records and identity theft and faces up to seven years in prison for the forgery charge.

"This is one of the most difficult and problematic evolutions of e-mail," Spitzer said. "Much `spam' is bothersome but not illegal. When it involves forged identity and identity theft, then it is clearly illegal."

Investigators had been trying to nab Carmack for more than a year. His is the first person charged under New York's identity theft statute, enacted in October, officials said.

A federal judge in Atlanta awarded EarthLink, the nation's third-largest Internet service provider, damages of $16.4 million and a permanent injunction against Carmack last week. EarthLink said Carmack used 343 stolen identities to sign up for e-mail accounts.

Carmack was banned by the judge from sending spam (unsolicited e-mails) or helping others send it. His e-mails included offers for herbal Viagra, weight-loss products and get-rich schemes, including bulk e-mail programs.

"This shows spamming has both civil and criminal consequences," said Dave Baker, EarthLink's vice president of law and public policy. "He was a prolific spammer who was costing us, our customers and Internet users everywhere. It's not just an inconvenience and annoyance, it's fraudulent."

Investigators said they were unsure just how much Carmack made from his e-mail business, but didn't think it was much, perhaps a few thousand dollars.

"We don't believe that his commercial operations were an enormous success," Spitzer said.

Carmack is scheduled to appear in court again Monday. It was unknown if Carmack had hired an attorney yet. His telephone number was not listed.

In January, state Supreme Court Justice Lottie E. Wilkins permanently barred MonsterHut.com of Niagara Falls from sending commercial e-mails to Internet subscribers without their permission.

State officials accused the company of sending about 500 million unsolicited commercial e-mails and then telling complaining recipients that they had requested it.

Spitzer sued MonsterHut after some 750,000 computer users complained that since March 2001 they had received the unwanted messages and tried to have them stopped but were told they had "opted in" to receive them.
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It's the old get-rich-quick obsession. It hits someone and they don't stop until it becomes the biggest losing proposition they could ever imagine. Guess he'll be busting a lot of rocks to pay damages of 16.4 million bucks!

You want to tell us how much spam you get?

Can you imagine how fast and slick the Net would be without these creeps clogging up our ISPs? This was One Guy!

man..... the speed of the 'net would be so beautiful again.

i'm very lucky in that i've avoided spam most of my whole ten years of being on-line. i give my email to friends, family and rare places.... butttt aparantly i gave it out to the wrong fucker cuz now im getting 15-40 a day......

thinking on changing my email.

I hope they put him away for a long time, and that he drops the soap often.

That number staggers the mind...

If you sent 1 e-mail every second, it would take you over 26 YEARS to send 825 milllion.

Jail's too good for this guy.

-Mikey

god i hate spam.. my hotmail account is practically useless because of the hundreds of spams i get there every day.. the filter doesn't help much.

I'm glad he's gone, but you know what someone else is just gonna take his place. And personally i just stopped using a yahoo account b/c of spam. Everyday i'd get at least 300 new messages. And their filter isn't worth the money it cost to put it on yahoo's site.

I keep a hotmail account that I use just to give to potential "spam bait". I go in every few days and clean house. That keeps my "real e-mail clear of the garbage. Oh, and btw, shoot the SOB!:mad:

UPDATE: more details from the life of Mr. Spam
 

SPAMMER GETS MESSAGE

NY Post


May 18, 2003 -- TO have any chance of making easy money on the Internet, computer geek Howard Carmack knew he had to send more than a million junk e-mails every day.
And to avoid being detected by Internet companies that try to block the nuisance messages, he needed to become devious.

So to keep his annoying spam flowing across the Web and into the in-boxes of hundreds of thousands of e-mail users, the 36-year-old stole the identities of strangers and hacked into their e-mail accounts, investigators have learned - and he also betrayed members of his own family.

Carmack not only stole his uncle Joseph's identity; his mentally disabled brother, James Jr., was also a victim, according to court papers.


Last week, Carmack was charged by the State Attorney General's Office with four felony counts and two misdemeanors for allegedly using false identities and stolen credit-card or bank-account information to create 343 e-mail accounts through which he sent about 825 million spam messages.

The spam offered products for sale from herbal sexual stimulants, to bulk e-mail lists, to get-rich-quick schemes - and even spam-blocking devices - prosecutors said.

The complaint, filed in Buffalo City Court, alleges that on the day of his arrest, Carmack possessed computer software designed for e-mail forgery and other software programs for sending spam e-mails with forged return addresses to millions of consumers.

If convicted of the most serious charges, he could spend up to seven years in prison.

His arrest Tuesday was the first under New York's new identity-theft statute enacted last October.

The state's charges against Carmack came after a relentless pursuit of a mystery spammer by Internet company EarthLink after the service provider detected a huge amount of spam e-mails originating from the Buffalo, N.Y., area.

In an action separate from the state charges, EarthLink sued Carmack for damages. Last week, as he was being arrested by New York authorities, a judge in Atlanta awarded the Georgia-based EarthLink a $16.4 million judgment against Carmack.

Dave Baker, an EarthLink vice president, conceded the money will probably never be collected, but the company was content that one of its most troublesome spammers had been disabled.

Howard Carmack lived with his widowed mother, Judith, and his brother in a two-story home on Parkridge Ave. in Buffalo. His grandmother lived across the street.

When investigators from EarthLink began their probe into the source of the Buffalo spam, they traced hundreds of e-mail accounts to the two Parkridge Ave. homes.

According to EarthLink attorney Paul Wellborn, the company's investigators said Carmack was neither the most prolific, nor the most successful spammer they had uncovered. But they rated him as one of the most brazen they had tracked.

Carmack was a spammer who did not shy away from soiling the family nest, Wellborn said.

"This was especially devious given the egregious act of stealing the identity of his mentally handicapped brother," said Wellborn.

The attorney added that when investigators first confronted Carmack, he tried to pass himself off as his uncle, Joseph.

In fact, Joseph Carmack, as well as Howard's brother Jimmy, along with a "John Doe," had been named in a complaint filed by EarthLink last year.

In a sworn statement to investigators, Joseph Carmack said he contacted Howard after he learned he was being sued by Earthlink for sending spam. He said his nephew told him "it is nothing to worry about."

"Upon Howard's advice, [we] ignored the lawsuit," Joseph said in his statement.

The 6-foot, 260-pound Carmack looks nothing like the stereotype nerdy computer geeks often associated with online crimes.

HE is "very muscular," according to relatives, and was a high school football player.

His love of sports was reflected in e-mail account passwords he frequently chose - including football and baseball. Buffalo and 12345 were others he used for his fraudulently obtained accounts, according EarthLink investigators.

Carmack's mixture of brawn and cleverness came in handy for avoiding EarthLink's attempts to serve him with legal documents.

"He assaulted prior investigators who came to him to discuss the matter," said Peter M. Vito, a private investigator hired by EarthLink to serve papers on Carmack.

"He'd dodged service for a number of months, if not a year. He would do a counter surveillance of the neighborhood before coming home to make sure there were no vehicles he was unfamiliar with - and no one he was unfamiliar with inside those [cars] that he knew."

Based upon his surveillance, Vito said, Carmack appeared to have no outside employment during the time he was tracking him.

Mary Youngblood, who led the EarthLink investigation that identified Carmack, said his undoing was a result of his refusal to lay low. Even as investigators closed in, Carmack continued to send millions of e-mails each day, she said.

Youngblood, whose evidence helped bolster the state charges against Carmack, said her investigation began in March 2002.

She said a person EarthLink dubbed "The Buffalo Spammer" regularly purchased dial-up accounts using fraudulent and/or stolen credit-card numbers, false bank-account numbers and fake identities.

As each illegal account was detected and terminated by Earthlink, "The Buffalo Spammer" would open another.

Youngblood said that to evade EarthLink's spam-stopping filters and prolong the life of his accounts, Carmack often used sophisticated "spoofing" identity falsification techniques including changing addresses, headers and subject lines.

Each account tended to last 2.5 days and was used to send a million spams per day, she said.

The rewards for Carmack, however, appear to have been relatively small.

Angelo Tirico, a Florida-based Web site advertiser, said in a declaration in the EarthLink lawsuit that he paid Carmack $10 per sale of products such as nonprescription alternatives to Viagra.

He said Carmack's more than 10 million spams over a three-month period generated a mere 36 sales - $360 in commissions for efforts.

Wellborn said "The Buffalo Spammer" may have played his hand too strongly.

Many of Carmack's spam e-mails gave his mother's address as a contact address for buyers to get products, Wellborn said.

And when Wellborn telephoned Carmack in October 2002 to imply EarthLink might take legal action against him, Carmack boasted he could never be held responsible because "nothing is in my name."

Retired North Dakota school teacher Wallace Olson was among the victims whose names and social security numbers were allegedly stolen by Carmack from information he found online.

"I don't think it's cost me anything, but you still wonder if your next credit card bill will have charges you're not familiar with," Olson said.

"It makes you wonder if he'll have your number after he comes out [of prison] again. And they got the guy, but does he have friends? I don't use my credit card that much, but I now take a good look at [the statement] when I get it each month."

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I'm now getting stuff with my name on it (somehow) and a postmaster returned message undeliverable attachment that is nothing but spam.

I get stuff sent from variations of my name and address.

I get crap with the world's sneakiest messages on it.

It's to the point that I am probably deleting legitimate messages from friends because nearly everything is looking suspicious anymore.

I don't really like yahoo much anymore but they have beefed up filters lately. Only 1-2 get passed the filters a day now.

I hate the Sneaky messages the most. Its most time the simple crap like "hey mike!" and its from someone I knew in the past. Most of my emails are from people I know from games, forums, chatrooms so I get alot of legit "remember me?" subject lines and usually end up opening a few spams with similar names.

I'm not too worried about having my name in the from line because its spam 101% of time time and never gets passed my filters..

I remember my aol account got cracked once and someone sent like 100 e-mails from it. It was spam for some porn site. Now past the anoyence of getting my aol account shut down and had to call them to get it reactivated I also had to deal with two months of people e-mailing me back saying stupid crap about spam.

Fuck the spammers, they have to be the most annoying humans on earth!

spam guy gets it good
 

Here's the followup:

Spammer Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison

May 28, 8:23 AM (ET)

apnews.myway.com

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) - A man who sent 850 million junk e-mails through accounts he opened with stolen identities was sentenced to up to seven years in prison on Thursday.
Atlanta-based Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. said it hoped the sentence and an earlier $16.4 million civil judgment against Howard Carmack will deter other spammers.
"Before spammers send one more spam e-mail, we think they should remember that what happened to Howard Carmack can happen to them," said Karen Casion, Earthlink's assistant general counsel.
Jurors sentenced Carmack to seven years for convictions in March of forgery, identity theft and falsifying business records. He must serve a minimum 3 1/2 years.
Earthlink said Carmack ran 343 illegal e-mail accounts under false names from 2002 until his arrest last May, using them to send unsolicited e-mail ads for things like get-rich-quick schemes and sexual enhancers.
Carmack told the judge he believed the case against him was overblown, saying there were no victims. "I obviously regret this whole involvement," he said.
Carmack was convicted of defrauding EarthLink and eight men from New York, Ohio and Washington, D.C. Last May, the company won a $16.4 million civil judgment against Carmack.

Just read in the paper where he got 7 years---good---I still think they should break his farking fingers and bend them back over his knuckels....

My daughters email had 2,806 spam messages in it...my grand daughters do not need information on how to make their penis bigger....VG

What about going after the companies that hire the spammers? They are hiring the people to conduct spamming operations.

I have had my hotmail account since the dawning of the internet. Now it's mostly useless. I went to Atlanta for a week - didn't check my email. I come back 600 new messages. 599 of them were spam. And to be honest, if I didn't carefully look through the emails, I would have deleted that one real email. My gripe with spam is just that. You get so much of it, I occasionally mistake real mail as spam and it gets deleted. I use mostly Yahoo now, and while I find their filters much better than Hotmail's, they too sometimes filter out good emails.

There was a senator that proposed charging for each email sent a while ago. While I was against that, they should make a bill that would charge for each email sent over say 1000 a day or something. That would be reasonable. That would deter most spammers.

They should tell his prison buddies he's a child molester.

That wouldn't be too far from the truth in too many cases. Even with parental controls, my children were subjected to porn spam so much we had to close their accounts. Sending the information to the server did no good-as these articles attest, the sender just had to change certain details to get a new 'from' address. I have a few Hotmail boxes, 2 of which I use for sign-up to sites only and they get deluged- I just cleaned out 187 junk emails from one of them-took 3 weeks to accumulate that and from what I understand, that is kind of slow.
My brother had his identity stolen 3 years ago and is still not in the clear-the thief was actually traced to MY area, while my brother lives in NC.
Our own AOL was shut down 2 years ago because someone hacked into my husband's email address and sent out over 500 spams in his name. We were lucky-that was all that was done to us and it was cleared up quickly. But too many people have their financial lives ruined by these LOSERS who don't have the brass balls to face the world honestly and do legitimate work with their knowledge.

Even though the civil judgement was a joke and will never be paid, I am thrilled that he got jail time. I hope he makes some really 'special' friends there.

"So what you in for?"

"Armed Robbery, What about you?"

"...I sent some e-mails to some folks and faked some ID's"

"your one of them Spammers that fills my e-mail and wastes my computer time? Come here, Bitch!"

Hehehehe. That brought a smile to my face.


Seriously though, why isn't spamming ilegal? And surely there are ways and means of tracking down the origin of said emails?

Before we get rid pf junk e-mail I want them to get rid of normal junk mail. It's a waste of fuckin' paper. At least junk e-mail just disapears when you erase it. You don't have to worry about filling up a land fill with $1 off ads for Pizza Hut.

why do ppl like him exist?