Twenty-three year old Oleg Nikolaenko, the leader of the world’s largest Spam e-mail ring, will appear in a Wisconsin court today on charges that he violated the CAN-SPAM act by intentionally falsifying header information in commercial e-mail messages and sending at least 2,500 spam e-mails per day.
Prosecutors say that his organization, Mega-D, could send up to 10 billion messages a day and is responsible for 32 percent of the worlds Spam mail. Still, the director of malware analysis for Internet-security company SecureWorks Inc. Court documents show he earned $459,098.47 for about half a year’s work – most of which was automatically deleted. Joe Stewart told AP that this won’t stop the barrage of male enhancement pill offers that we receive almost every day because any decline in Spam would have already occurred when people were tipped off the FBI was cracking down on Nikolaenko last year. Nikolaenko was caught after a person he worked with to peddle fake Rolex watches through spam mail turned him in.
More on TIME.com:
Facebook’s New Messaging Service: Please Don’t Call It E-Mail