'Buffalo Spammer' convicted

IDG News Service - A man accused of using EarthLink Inc. e-mail accounts to release a flood of spam on the Internet has been convicted on charges of identity theft and falsifying business records, according to a statement from New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
Howard Carmack of Buffalo, N.Y., also known as the "Buffalo Spammer," was found guilty by a jury in Erie County, N.Y., on 14 counts, including charges that he stole the identities of two Buffalo-area residents, which he then used to send more than 800 million spam messages, the attorney general's office said.
Carmack is scheduled to be sentenced on May 27 and faces three to seven years in prison.
The New York state case against Carmack was the first to use a new state identity-theft law that makes identity theft a misdemeanor, said Brad Maione, a spokesman for the attorney general's office. Previously, identity theft wasn't a crime, he said.
The charges of falsifying business records stem from Carmack's changing of e-mail header information to create forged sender addresses for the spam messages, the attorney general's office said.
The criminal investigation of Carmack was a cooperative effort by the attorney general's office, the New York State Police and the FBI's Buffalo Cyber Task Force. The criminal charges brought by New York state followed a civil case brought by Atlanta-based EarthLink against Carmack, who an internal investigation identified as the source of a spike in spam e-mail traffic from the Buffalo area.
In that case, EarthLink accused Carmack of using the e-mail accounts set up using stolen credit card numbers to send a flood of spam, often from accounts registered to family members, that advertised a variety of get rich quick schemes, herbal stimulants and cable-television descramblers. A district court in Atlanta awarded EarthLink a $16 million settlement against Carmack, then 36, last May (see story).

EarthLink's abuse team manager, Mary Youngblood, testified against Carmack in the state trial, providing evidence about the methods Carmack used to allegedly send the spam messages.
The ruling against Carmack has been devastating for his family, according to Joseph Carmack, Howard Carmack's uncle.
Carmack may have been spamming, but didn't understand the severity of the charges against him, he said in a phone interview. At one point, Howard Carmack told his mother that spamming wasn't illegal, citing newspaper reports and saying that everyone on computers was doing it, the elder Carmack said.
"The [attorney general] has taken one thing and made it into something different," the uncle said, adding that he hadn't heard