Man pleads guilty to abetting spam king Ralsky
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
David S. Patton of Centreville, Virginia, pleaded guilty in federal court in Detroit yesterday to aiding and abetting the spam operation of Alan Ralsky and others responsible for a "pump and dump" scam to raise the value of Chinese penny stocks.
Patton is facing up to six years in prison and agrees to pay a fine of $3,000 while forfeiting $50,100 in proceeds from the sale of his software, which was used by the spam operation, according to the Department of Justice.
Patton's company, Lightspeed Marketing, developed the software used to send large volumes of spam email at high speeds and disguise the true origin of the emails from recipients in order to evade anti-spam filters, "blacklisting" and other spam-blocking devices and techniques.
Patton admitted that he intentionally designed a program called Nexus to enable users to insert materially false information into the headers of the spam emails it sent to disguise their source.
Patton also designed a program called Proxy Scanner to enable users to make use of third-party proxy computers in a botnet to relay or retransmit spam emails and in turn disguise their true origin.
Prosecutors said Patton is the twelfth defendant charged in connection with the spam email operation run by Ralsky from January 2004 to September 2005.
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