NJ man pleads guilty to national e-mail conspiracy with MU graduates
A New Jersey man pleaded guilty Tuesday to spamming student e-mail accounts at hundreds of universities, including MU, with the help of two MU graduates, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri
Paul Zucker, 57, of Wayne, New Jersey, pleaded guilty to conspiracy. Zucker and three co-conspirators are accused of using a program to illegally harvest student e-mail addresses from servers at more than 2,000 colleges and universities across the United States. Zucker faces up to five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. The date for a sentencing hearing has not been set.
According to the federal indictment, "The defendants then used this unlawfully-gained database of email addresses, numbering well over 8 million, to send targeted spam emails selling various products and services to those college students."
According to the news release, Zucker's co-conspirators are Amir Shah, 29, of St. Louis and Osmaan Shah, 26, of Columbia. The two are brothers and graduates of MU. According to Don Ledford, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney, the Shah brothers have entered not guilty pleas, but are scheduled to change their pleas at a July 28 hearing. A fourth defendant, Liu Guang Ming, resides in China and cannot be extradited, Ledford said.
The alleged crimes occurred starting in January 2004, when the Shah brothers were MU students, Ledford said the indictment states that in at least one incident, the Shahs connected to the Internet in an empty MU classroom to commit the alleged crime.
"They were actually engaged in a lot of this criminal conduct while they were students at the university," Ledford said.
