On Monday, Christopher Rad, the 44-year-old Texan convicted of organizing and leading a conspiracy to commit securities fraud through the use of botnets located throughout the world, has been sent to prison to serve a 71-month or roughly six-year jail time.

Rad was convicted in November 2012 of arranging "pump-and-dump" stock scams, a scheme where fraudsters purchase low-priced stock, send out millions of spam e-mails flaunting the stock as a "hot buy" and then dispose their shares as soon as that stock's share price goes up because spam respondents had bitten into the scam and bought into the stock.

Rad and his cohorts netted nearly $3 million from the illegal activity which ran from May 2007 and continued through February 2009. The spam that they used came from computers around the world that had been infected by viruses. Some of these computers were located in New Jersey, others were found as far away as Europe and Russia. The network was controlled from servers in Russia, China and elsewhere.

"Christopher Rad's use of hackers to drive his pump-and-dump scheme illustrates a trend toward the modern mechanization of old-school scams," US attorney Paul Fishman said.

"Law enforcement is constantly anticipating and adapting as criminals operate in a more virtual - and more global - world."

Rad was convicted of six counts, including:

(1) Conspiracy of furthering securities fraud by transmitting spam using false e-mail headers and transmitting spam using falsely registered e-mail addresses;

(2) Conspiracy to transmit spam by gaining unauthorized access to computers and using those computers to transmit spam; and

(3) Four counts of transmission of spam by gaining unauthorized access to computers and using those computers to transmit spam.

Rad paid the spammers over $1.4 million during the twenty-two months of the conspiracy.

Apart from jail time, Rad has likewise been ordered to pay a $30,000 fine, with restitution to be determined at a later date.

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