Steve Shklovskiy and Yan Shtok, both 23, received prison sentences and have been ordered to pay $100,000 in restitution for their parts in the scam, at least $320,000 less than the sum apparently made. Two others involved were sentenced to probation.
The college students devised a means of using commercially available software to “harvest” e-mail addresses on their PCs. Their spam e-mails offered work from home stuffing envelopes subject to payment of the $35 “processing fee.“ Thousands of recipients sent their money to fictitious businesses at postal box addresses.
According to Associated Press, ISPs including AOL, AT&T and Mindspring were threatened with system overload by the sending of the bulk e-mails.