Russian held over global spam alert

Published on Friday 3 December 2010 21:23

A RUSSIAN accused of operating an e-mail spam business that at times accounted for one third of global spam has pleaded not guilty in a US court.

Oleg Nikolaenko denies running a global network of more than 500,000 virus-infected personal computers, in violation of a US anti-spam law.

Nikolaenko asked to be allowed a form of house arrest pending trial, but the judge in a Wisconsin federal court ordered him to be held without bail fearing he might otherwise flee.

"He is a citizen and resident of Russia and the government believes, if released, he would seek to return there and the government wouldn't be able to prosecute him," said prosecutor Erica O'Neil.

Nikolaenko is accused of running a botnet, hijacking other people's computers to send out billions of e-mails. Prosecutors claim the infected computers were capable of sending up to 10 billion e-mails a day.

Some experts say at one point the e-mails blasted out from the network accounted for one in every three spam e-mails sent in the world.

Nikolaenko is charged under the seven-year-old CAN-SPAM Act with intentionally falsifying information in commercial e-mails and sending at least 2,500 spam e-mails a day.