PHILADELPHIA - A transplanted Philadelphia Phillies fan now living in California has been charged with computer-hacking attacks on the Phillies, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, flooding the team, sports writers and editors with tens of thousands of e-mailed complaints and excoriations.

Allan Eric Carlson, 39, who formerly lived in Vineland and Merchantville in South Jersey, was arrested on Tuesday by FBI agents at his Glendale, Calif., home, according to U.S. Attorney Patrick L. Meehan.

In 1995, Carlson, a suspected white supremacist, was prohibited by a California court from putting hate leaflets into supermarket products. In 1996, he was sentenced to 32 months in prison for vandalizing more than two dozen luxury cars in California.

Carlson was indicted in this latest case on 79 counts of computer- hacking related offenses and identity theft. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 471 years in prison and $117,250,000 in fines.

Meehan's office said that from about November 2001 to December 2002, Carlson "hacked into computers of unsuspecting users and from those computers launched spam email attacks with long messages voicing his complaints about the Phillies management. ...

"When launching the spam emails, Carlson's list of addresses included numerous bad addresses. When those e-mails arrived at their destinations, the indictment charges that they were `returned' or `bounced' back to the person who purportedly sent them - the persons whose email addresses had been `spoofed' or hijacked. This caused floods of emails into those accounts."

Mercury News (source)


The wise make mistakes, the fools repeat them
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When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth