On Tuesday a New Jersey man, Adam Vitale, 27, originally faced 11 years in jail and a $250,000 fine for violating the CAN-SPAM Act. Vitale came to the attention of investigators after assuring their paid informant he could spam hundreds of millions of people. His boasting netted him 30 big ones, also known as months, behind bars.

At the hearing, US District Judge Denny Chin said: 'Spamming is serious criminal conduct; this is not a teenager engaging in child’s play.' Prior to the judge reading the decision, Vital said, 'Given the opportunity, I will never do anything like this again, I really am sorry.'

Prosecutors said Vitale had 22 prior convictions and had also helped run an online prostitution ring on the Web site www.craigslist.com, but he has not been criminally charged for these illegal acts.

Vitale and co-defendant Todd Moeller, 28, were arrested by the Secret Service in February 2006 after setting up a scheme to advertise a PC security application in exchange for 50 percent of the profits. The person these two bragging spammers wanted to share their ill gotten gains with was simply the wrong person to be boasting to. Moeller was caught by bragging to the paid federal informant about the money he was making: as much as $40,000 per week. Pump-and-dump stock e-mails were the most lucrative, Moeller said in court documents.

Moeller made a plea bargain for a lighter sentence with U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan. In November 2007, he was sentenced to 27 months behind bars. His bragain with prosecutors included explaining their spamming techniques and testifying against his partner, Adam Vitale.

According to court documents, Moeller and Vitale devised ways to defeat AOL's filtering system by using a variety of computer servers and changing the header information on e-mails to ensure they could not be traced..

During one week in August 2005, the two of them managed to target over 1.27 million AOL e-mail addresses with spam.

The longest jail sentence for a similar crime was 57 months behind bars. That was for malware writer, Jeanson James Ancheta, 21, who was sentenced for seizing control of 400,000 PCs to install revenue-generating adware. Ancheta also sold access to those zombie networks to other crooks who wanted to launch denial-of-service attacks and spam campaigns. On several blogs, users said Ancheta's sentence was too light. The same is being said by AOL bloggers about Adam Vitale's and co-defendant Todd Moeller's prison sentences X