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Man allegedly forged millions of e-mails
- From: Paul Howell
- Date: Tue Jun 06 06:44:07 2000
Man allegedly forged millions of e-mails
By The Associated Press
Special to CNET News.com
June 5, 2000, 10:00 p.m. PT
URL: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-2024887.html
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.--A man in California hijacked the computer
system of a New York state company to send millions of e-mails to
America Online customers about pornographic web sites or
get-rich-quick schemes, the district attorney said today.
The "spam" messages were disguised to look as if they had been
sent from ibm.net, IBM's Internet provider, said District Attorney
Jeanine Pirro.
"You couldn't find him to complain, but he could find you to make
money off you," she said. "This is an old crime, committed in a new
way. He was basically brokering porn and various schemes, and it
was forgery because he used this false return address."
Jason Garon, 46, of Mission Viejo, Calif., surrendered this morning
and was arraigned on charges of forgery and computer tampering. If
convicted he could be sentenced to up to seven years in prison. He
was released without bail pending a September court hearing.
A call to Garon's lawyer, Bruce Bendish, was not immediately
returned.
Pirro said the message traffic Garon allegedly sent through the
Market Vision company in Irvington, a graphics studio, was so heavy
that it crashed the company's internal network, causing damage in
repairs and business downtime.
Ed Greenberg, owner of the company, said his losses amounted to
about $18,000.
The district attorney's office said the criminal prosecution for Internet
forgery was the first of its kind in the United States.
In Los Angeles last year, four men pleaded guilty to fraud charges
for sending 50 million e-mails asking job seekers to pay $35 each for
a chance to work at home stuffing envelopes.
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