This scumbag named Scott Levine was convicted last August of breaking into computer data warehouse company Acxiom's servers and downloading gigabytes of confidential consumer data. He then used this to spam the hell out of everyone.

He has now been sentenced to 8 years in prison and fined $12,300. I think the fine is ridiculously low. Maybe a class action suit of some kind will make up for that.

CNET

A bulk e-mailer who looted more than a billion records with personal information from a data warehouse has been sentenced to eight years in prison, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

Scott Levine, 46, was sentenced by a federal judge in Little Rock, Ark. ... in what the U.S. Justice Department calls one of the largest data heists to date. Acxiom, based in Little Rock, says it operates the world's largest repository of consumer data, and counts major banks, credit card companies and the U.S. government among its customers.

In August 2005, a jury convicted Levine, a native of Boca Raton, Fla., and former chief executive of a bulk e-mail company called Snipermail.com, of 120 counts of unauthorized access to a computer connected to the Internet. The U.S. government says, however, there was no evidence that Levine used the data for identity fraud.

This guy is the lowest of the low. And Acxiom doesnt have a leg to stand on either as this isnt the first time it has happened to them.

This is not the first prosecution to arise out of poor security practices on Acxiom's file transfer protocol server (FTP). An Ohio man named Daniel Baas previously pleaded guilty to illegally entering Acxiom's FTP site. That investigation led federal police--including the FBI and Secret Service--to Levine, according to the Justice Department.

If you're interested in exactly how they cracked the FTP server, see the article above where there's more info.