A 23-year-old Russian man accused of running a worldwide spamming network, which Internet-security experts say on some days accounted for one of every three unwanted e-mails, is scheduled to appear in a Wisconsin courtroom to hear charges against him.
Oleg Y. Nikolaenko, of Moscow, will be arraigned Friday in federal court in Milwaukee. He is charged with violating the CAN-SPAM act by intentionally falsifying header information in commercial e-mail messages and sending at least 2,500 spam e-mails per day, the minimum threshold for the charge. Prosecutors say his network may have sent up to 10 billion messages per day.
The charge carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Nikolaenko was arrested last month at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. He is being tried in Milwaukee because that’s where an undercover FBI investigator ordered Viagra through an e-mail distributed by Nikolaenko’s alleged operation and received bogus herbal pills instead, said Lance Barnes, the FBI’s supervisory special agent of the Milwaukee cyber squad.
In the criminal complaint against Nikolaenko, prosecutors say authorities were tipped off to his involvement after another man pleaded guilty in Missouri federal court to a charge of conspiring to traffic in counterfeit Rolex watches. That defendant told investigators he solicited customers by paying spammers more than $2 million to send a barrage of e-mail ads.
That information led the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission to a spamming operation in Australia, where investigators discovered the workers had exchanged e-mails with Nikolaenko. Subsequent digging linked Nikolaenko to one of the most sophisticated spamming networks in the world — “Mega-D,” which investigators said accounted for 32 percent of all worldwide spam.
Nikolaenko’s attorney, Chris Van Wagner, said Thursday he hadn’t seen the evidence and hoped to have access to it soon.
“We intend to present a rigorous defense to whatever…