AOL spammer gets two-year jail sentence

A New Jersey man was sentenced to more than two years in prison on Friday for helping send spam emails to more than 1.2 million AOL subscribers.

Todd Moeller, 28, was sentenced 27 months in prison in a federal court in New York after he was caught making a deal with a government informant to send spam emails advertising a computer security program in return for 50 percent of the profits, the US Attorney's Office in Manhattan said.

Moeller and Adam Vitale of New York pleaded guilty earlier this year to breaking anti-spam laws and defeating AOL's filter system by using a variety of computer servers and changing the header information on emails to ensure they could not be traced, court papers said.

Moeller told the informant via instant messaging he could conceal the source of the emails through his access to 40 different servers and had profited $40,000(£19,200) a month from other spam email scams that promoted stocks, prosecutors said.

In one week in August 2005 Moeller and Vitale sent emails on behalf of the informant to more than 1.27 million addresses of subscribers at AOL, the online division of Time Warner.

Vitale will be sentenced on 13 November.

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