Ex-AOL Employee Gets 15 Months in Prison

[Jeff]

Just over a year ago we reported on an AOL employee who stole 92 million screen names and sold them to a spammer. Yesterday afternoon the judge passed down Jason Smathers's sentence.

Smathers struck a plea bargain with the District Attorny and agreed to assist the government in tracking down the recipient of the list in exchange for a prison term of not more than 1 1/2 years. He received a 15-month sentence from U.S. District Judge Alvin Hllerstein.

Though the Smathers case is over and he will have over a year to think about what to do with his life next, the problems he has caused won't just go away. The original list, which supposedly cost AOL somewhere between US$300,000 and millions of dollars (I wonder how many accountants it took to come up with that number), is believed to remain in circulation amongst spammers.

Source: ars technica