Jason Smathers is a former employee of America Online.
In February 2005, Smathers pled guilty to violations of the US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.[1] Smathers was accused and convicted of illegally selling approximately 92 million AOL member screen names, belonging to 30 million AOL customers, to a third party, who then sold the list to many spammers.[2]
Smathers made $28,000 on the initial sale. On August 17, 2005, Smathers was sentenced to one year and three months in prison and fined $82,000 in restitution.[3] Jason Smathers tried to enter a guilty plea early on. However, the Court rejected his plea as at the time it was not clear to the Court that Smathers had in fact broken the law under which he was being charged, although it was clear that he had broken some law. Judge Hellerstein said that he stopped using his own AOL account back in December because he was getting too much spam. Smathers used another employee's ID in April and May 2003 to assemble a complete list of AOL's customer account screen names, zip codes, telephone numbers and credit card types, but not credit cards. Jason Smathers was 23 years old. The maximum sentence is five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.