Seattle Trademark Lawyer

The Seattle Times reported that Robert Soloway, 27, was arrested in Seattle this morning for allegedly illegal acts connected with spamming campaigns. He was indicted by a grand jury last week. The 35-count indictment states that Mr. Soloway and his company, Newport Internet Marketing Corp., engaged in mail fraud, wire fraud, fraud in connection with email, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering.

Among other things, the indictment stated that Mr. Soloway and Newport Internet Marketing (NIM) “created and published a series of websites on the World Wide Web during the period from November 28, 2003, until May 23, 2007, using a variety of ‘company’ names, and hosted with dozens of different domain names. The content of the websites created and published by ROBERT ALAN SOLOWAY and NIM consisted of commercial advertisements for ‘broadcast email’ services and products (that is, SOLOWAY was offering, for a price, to either send out a high volume of e-mail messages on behalf of a customer, or to sell a software product to the customer that would enable them to send out their own high volume e-mail messages).”

The indictment also stated: “The ‘broadcast email’ services advertised and sold by ROBERT ALAN SOLOWAY and NIM also did not perform as advertised. The ‘broadcast email’ that ROBERT ALAN SOLOWAY and NIM did transmit on behalf of paying customers constituted “spam”; i.e., bulk and high volume commercial e-mail messages that contained false and forged headers and that was relayed using a proxy computer network. Customers who had purchased the ‘service,’ and who complained thereafter or asked for refunds were threatened by ROBERT ALAN SOLOWAY and NIM with additional financial charges and referral to a collection agency.”

The Seattle Times noted: “In 2005, Microsoft won a judgment against Soloway for spamming. Soloway’s company, Newport Internet Marketing, allegedly sent e-mails that appeared to have come from MSN and Hotmail addresses, both of which are owned by Microsoft.

“Also that year, an Oklahoma businessman won a $10 million default judgment against Soloway in a claim he violated the federal CAN-SPAM Act and Oklahoma’s anti-spam laws.”