AOL Email Thief Goes To Prison Monday

Identity theft doesn’t pay, and that includes email addresses. That will be the message when Jason Smathers turns himself into authorities Monday to begin serving a 15 month jail sentence. Smathers was convicted last month of stealing more than 90 million email addresses from AOL and selling them to a spammer.

Smathers also may be required to repay AOL for its costs in dealing with spam created by his sale of the names as well as its costs in employee time spent conducting the investigation.

After cooperating with authorities, Smathers was sentenced to only 15 months in prison rather than the two years he could have received for the information theft.

posted by Consumer Help Web Editorial Team at 7:02 PM |