Kilbride got a stiffer sentence, says the Department of Justice for obstructing justice "by attempting to prevent a government witness from testifying at trial." The DOJ didn’t say whether it was one of three "co-conspirators," one of eight citizen spam recipients from Massachusetts, Texas, Iowa, California and Arizona, or other witnesses.

After the passing of the CAN-SPAM Act in 2003, Kilbride and Schaffer logged into remote servers in Amsterdam to make it appear the messages were coming from outside the US. They were actually sent from Phoenix.

Evidence at trial established that they set up a shell corporation in the Republic of Mauritius, and were funneling proceeds to offshore accounts there, as well as on the Isle of Man.

Show there’s no honor among spammers, three "co-conspirators," Jennifer Clason, 32, of Tempe, Ariz.; Andrew Ellifson, 31, of Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Kirk Rogers, 43, of Manhattan Beach, Calif., all turned on Kilbride and Schaffer in court, and pleaded guilty for their roles in the operation.

The millions of unsolicited messages sent had fake headers and domain names, and included hard core pornography images in the emails themselves in order to entice recipients to sign up for memberships. Some were viewed by recipients’ children, even after filters were set up to block such content.

At the request of Anthony Greco’s defense attorney, the 18-year-old’s sentence on charges related to spamming MySpace members and threatening to share his spam methods was sealed by a federal judge. Prosecutors are expected to request the unsealing of the sentence today.

Greco was at one time contracted by MySpace.com, the social networking web site that recently became part of News Corp after it purchased MySpace parent Intermix. His work with MySpace involved creating a program to send members instant message ads for adult-related and mortgage financing sites, AP reported.

He then created some 27,000 MySpace accounts to send those messages. After that, Greco asked to be hired on as an employee. When that request was ignored, he began issuing threats.

It is possible Greco will serve 18 to 24 months in jail, based on terms of a plea bargain earlier this year. MySpace claims it spent $20,000 deleting junk messages, updating its systems, and handling consumer complaints, but it is not known if they will pursue civil action against Greco.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.