AOL Employee Who Sold Addresses To Spammers Pleads Guilty, But Court Says No
from the whoops dept
That didn’t work out as planned. Earlier this year, an AOL employee was arrested for selling 92 million AOL email addresses to spammers. Apparently, he had worked out a plea bargain with prosecutors, and was scheduled to show up in court today and plead guilty. In return, he was expected to get some amount of jailtime. However, while that News.com story isn’t yet updated, it turns out that the judge has refused to accept the plea, claiming that he’s not convinced a crime was actually committed. While giving away information on 92 million email addresses certainly seems like it should be a crime, it looks like the guy was charged under everyone’s favorite anti-spam act: CAN SPAM. The problem, is that it’s not clear he actually violated that law. The judge, who claims he got rid of his own AOL email address because it got too much spam, wants to look over the details more carefully to make sure a crime was actually committed.
