Austin Spammer Settles for $10 Million

Former Austin "spam king" Ryan Pitylak and his former cohorts settled with the Texas Attorney General's Office yesterday, agreeing to pay $10 million in penalties and associated costs for running what the Statesman calls "one of the 'largest and most notorious' spam operations in the world":

According to Abbott's office, the companies bombarded consumers with millions of e-mails under at least 250 assumed names. The misleading subject lines gave the false impression that the information was important to them. Sending mass e-mails with deliberately misleading subject lines is illegal under federal law.

The e-mails solicited personal information that the defendants then sold to other companies, Abbott's office said.

The Statesman reports that he'll be selling his house in Tarrytown as well as his BMW to recoup part of the settlement. We did a little amateur sleuthing on Myspace to see if Pitylak, who graduated from UT last year, had anything to say regarding the compromise, but only found an empty profile where some dude named "Fixing Email" left the following comment:

This man knows more about how to fix email than most governments. Okay, than every government and that's not saying much...but he still knows a lot!

We'll say! Pitylak, newly reformed, has now decided to focus his energies tackling the very same band of evil-doers to which he once belonged.

*Photo by nsoup on stock.xchng