Meet Millionaire Spammer Jeremy Jaynes

prostoalex writes "Associated Press profiles Jeremy Jaynes, charged with sending out unsolicited e-mail messages, who just got a 9-year jail term recommendation from the state jury. With the help of 16 'high-speed' lines (Associated Press probably meant T1s) Jaynes would send out 10 million e-mails a day. His best month in terms of gross income netted him $750,000. Acccording to the article, 'In a typical month, prosecutors said during the trial, Jaynes might receive 10,000 to 17,000 credit card orders, thus making money on perhaps only one of every 30,000 e-mails he sent out. But he earned $40 a pop, and the undertaking was so vast that Jaynes could still pull in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead, McGuire said. "When you're marketing to the world, there are enough idiots out there" who will be suckered in, McGuire said in an interview.'"

There's one spammer born every second, too

[fembots (753724)]

So with this kind of high-profile "financial report", are we going to see more spammers? Seriously speaking, my spam count hasn't dropped a bit since the elimination of these 10 million spams a day. It's like that terrorism saying: If you killed Bin Laden, two more will come out to replace him.

This Jeremy is reportedly earning $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead.

Imagine if you can work 1 year without getting caught, and wisely transfered your incomes to safe place, you are basically earning $1 million a year by sitting in the prison doing some workouts, or even get a law degree specialised in anti-spam. And you wonder why there are more spams everyday?

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[spuzzzzzzz (807185)]

The significance of this case is that it applies a fairly harsh penalty for spamming. Of course it won't eliminate spam, but it will probably (hopefully) make spammers more aware of the consequences.

Imagine if you can work 1 year without getting caught

Imagine if you could work your whole life without getting caught. Because that was the situation before this verdict. Of course there are still strong financial incentives to spam, but with verdicts like this one, the incentives become weaker.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Zathras26 (763537)]

It doesn't apply a "fairly harsh penalty for spamming"; it applies a fairly harsh penalty for fraud. Had he been selling a legitimate product, his prison sentence would have been much shorter if he even received one at all.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Zathras26 (763537)]

I know that, but that wasn't my point. My point was that the sentence he received wasn't for spamming per se; it was for fraud that just happened to be committed thru spam. Not the same thing.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[gorbachev (512743)]

"The significance of this case is that it applies a fairly harsh penalty for spamming."

It was mainly due to the fact that the scum was peddling fraudulent "products". He conned a shitload of people with his MMF schemes and other frauds.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[lukewarmfusion (726141)]

You're so right it's scary. I'm reading this thinking, if I were given a million dollars a year maybe I wouldn't hate spam so much.

People go to jail for much less money... and since there are loopholes to be found and exploited, spamming is an attractive business.

Corporations contract out for spyware programs. Political groups contract out for viruses. If the money is there, it will be a temptation. You can't end if forever, but you can make it harder to do and much riskier.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[DJ Kveldulv (829139)]

Ive seen a slight drop in spam over the last 6 months. Making it illegal for merchants/affiliate programs to knowingly accept spammer's traffic would cut it down even more IMO. The Can-Spam regulations have meant few Porn Affiliate programs will take any and all spam traffic they can get. Most now require CanSpam compliance.... still, hardcore spammers are still going to spam hard, laws or no laws.

Depends

[Sycraft-fu (314770)]

If enough of them start going to jail, it'll probably help. Also as spam filters get better, profits will go down. The spam system we used to have was maybe 50% efficient, meaning about half the spam it recieved, it failed to filter. The new one (Barracuda) is probably 90-95% efficient. Means where a spammer had to send an average of 2 messages before to get through, now they have to send 10-20. It also shuts down on them much quicker so they can't hit the whole domain as easy.

Now there's been stories on /. about new spam filtering technologies in the works that are 99.9% or better (some saying 99.999%). If stuff like that hgets popular, it'll be a real bitch. Means you'd have to send between 1,000-1,000,000 e-mails on average to get through.

It's not a winnable war as in someday all spam will suddenly stop and no one will ever try again, but it's winnable in that between lawsuits, jail terms, and better filters we can make it a much less attractive bussiness.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[antifoidulus (807088)]

Well, from my personal observation, while there has been no decrease in spam, I have been noticing a diversification in the scams they are selling. Spammers are moving away from mortgages, get rich quick schemes, and pills(though they still are invested heavily in that area) to areas previously dominated by real life grifters-fake merchandise(esp. Rolex watches), "free" tvs, ipods, etc, and it also seems prostitution.
Sorry thing is, the same people will probably fall for these as fell for this guy's scam.

You've got mail!

[Rosco P. Coltrane (209368)]

who just got a 9-year jail term recommendation from the state jury

9 years in the slammer getting unsolicited gifts from Bubba? Wow! I bet at least one of the jurors purchased a penis enlarger and, let's say, wasn't totally satisfied with the results...

FYI, if you don't RTFA

[seizer (16950)]

The "McGuire" quoted here is the Attorney General, not the spammer. He's the one who states that he thinks people are idiots, not the spammer.

Mind you, the spammer will know that people are idiots :-)

C.R.E.A.M

[madsenj37 (612413)]

This article will just encourage people to make a living spamming with that much potential money.

AOL addresses

[6Yankee (597075)]

Prosecutors don't know how he got the lists, though McGuire said the AOL names matched a list of 92 million addresses an AOL software engineer has been charged with stealing. However Jaynes got them, they were particularly valuable because AOL customers and eBay users by their very nature have already shown a willingness to engage in e-commerce.

Or particularly valuable because AOL users are, well, AOL users?

Some additional details...

[grnchile (305671)]

Some additional details, including a charming picture, are available in his hometown paper:

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1828341p-81 41513c.html [newsobserver.com]

Yes - they were T1 lines.

Some quick math:

[sssmashy (612587)]

$40 per order

1 order per every 30,000 spam

est. $24,000,000 net worth = 600,000 orders = 18,000,000,000 spams

9 years jail time = 283,824,000 seconds

So the ratio is 63.4 spam messages per second of prison time

9 years in jail is too light...

[Dimensio (311070)]

...but no one else seems to agree with me that convicted email spammers should be slowly tortured to death.

Re:9 years in jail is too light...

[dmaxwell (43234)]

My favorite method is an electric chair where the switch has been replaced with a dimmer dial. The dial should be clearly marked where probable fatality starts of course.

parasites

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

Karl Rove, Bush's political controller, made his career in junk mail ("Direct Marketing"). He has had similar success, with better performance, fueled by a similar attitude towards his market: American voters. Think his "boss" will run a Justice Department intolerant of spammers like Jaynes? Or recruit from their ranks to move from victory to victory, at our expense?

Re:parasites

[jcr (53032)]

Rove didn't send his junk mail with postage due.

-jcr

Re:parasites

[jesterzog (189797)]

I don't know anything about Karl Rove, but my experience has been that the majority of direct marketing associations don't like regular spammers.

Direct marketers would like to be able to send people emails as much as everyone else, and I'm not trying to argue that this is a good thing. There are many sorts of direct marketers, however, and not all of them want to spam as many people as possible using brute force.

But their reputation is damaged by spammers who use very shady techniques to market directly to people. eg. Faking headers, distributing via viruses or infected machines, routing email through China where SMTP servers may be less secure, redirecting bounce messages to fake addresses (often innocent unsuspecting people with email accounts) essentially trying to hide the source of their emails, and selling illegal products.

Whichever way you spin it, these aren't ethical business practices, and if they're not against the law then there are a lot of legislators who would like to shut them down if it could be done cleanly.

I'm pretty sure that most direct marketers would like this person to be stopped as much as everyone else, simply because he's not doing them any favours by making people dislike direct marketing.

Penis enlargement

[Magickcat (768797)]

I bet he's now praying that none of his fellow inmates have purchased penis enlargement pills.

Humanity

[payndz (589033)]

Sometimes I wonder, 'Are there really still enough people out there greedy, naive and stupid enough to fall for spammers, phishers and 419ers and make them millionaires?

Then I think, 'Oh, wait. Human beings. Guh.' And I get depressed. Because I'm one of them, which makes me just as vulnerable to some new scam that has a bit more intelligence behind it...

9 Years is Not Enough

[zentec (204030)]

The sending of the spam was bad enough, the bigger problem is that this putz was engaging in fraud, plain and simple.

His attorney can argue free speech and the unconstitutional aspects of the CAN-SPAM act all he wants, the fact remains that he misled people using spam and sold them products and services of no value whatsoever.

Crime does indeed pay, and this shows it pays handsomely. Now the courts need to AGAIN provide some negative reinforement of that fact and lock this clown away with Andrew Fastow and the rest of the classic white collar criminals.

Idiots?

[hkb (777908)]

"When you're marketing to the world, there are enough idiots out there"

Those "idiots" often being trusting elderly people who don't know any better,perhaps your mother, your father, your grandmother.

Re:Idiots?

[Repton (60818)]

Well, y'know, twenty, thirty, forty years ago, these elderly people were adults in the prime of their lives. And fraudsters selling snake oil are not exactly a new phenomonon.

How old do you have to be before you stop being an idiot and start being a trusting elderly person who doesn't know any better?

The sentencing

[Henrik S. Hansen (775975)]

He gets 9 years? I think that's very extreme. In Denmark, my country, murderers can get less than that (IIRC, 16 years is max. penalty for any crime, incl. manslaughter).

Seriously, think about getting 9 years cut off your life. It's a very long time. And he only sent out some bulk advertising.

The issue here is how cultures and nations view people. In Denmark, the focus is on treatment of both criminals and their victims -- it's not just an issue of retaliation against the criminal. In the same spirit, noone (or only a miniscule minority) in Denmark wants the death penalty, it's totally against the danish way of thinking.

This is one of the reasons I like living in Denmark. In my mind, it's the mark of a modern nation to make an effort to resocialize criminals -- it's backwards to only say 'an eye for an eye'.

Re:The sentencing

[DongleFondle (655040)]

Well, you Danish are a beautiful people. However, In the Good ol' "Yew Es a' Aye", we call it the "justice" system for a reason. The historical backing reaching all the way to our present justice system does not believe in punishment for rehabilitation or even to act as a deterrent for crime (although many in this country argue that strong sentencing deters crime, this is complete bunk and there is absolutely NO evidence to support such a theory).

No, the reason for our criminal punishment system in the US has always been and still is compensation for the victim and/or victim's families, and as a plain simple punishment to those who have done wrong. As you so aptly put, "An eye for an eye", is just the way most people see things here. American's LOVE justice! They love to hate criminals, and they love to punish them. That is, until they find through the varying circumstances of life that they are all of sudden on the other side of the criminal fence, be it a speeding ticket or a drunken bar fight. Why THEN, you've never seen such righteous indignation at the brutal inequality of our laws. ;-)

You're way may well be a better way of dealing with crime, but trust me, things are not changing around here anytime soon.

Re:The sentencing

[Coryoth (254751)]

He gets 9 years? I think that's very extreme....It's a very long time. And he only sent out some bulk advertising.

He got 9 years for criminal fraud because he was fraudelently selling goods. Basically everything he sold was a complete scam. He committed literally many many milltions of dollars in fraud (half a million dollars a month on average). The fact that he did this by scamming hundreds and thousands of people out of a small amount of cash instead of the usual where you scam a few people for vast sums of money each doesn't really make a difference in the total amount of harm he caused.

To some extent I agree, 9 years is harsh, but it is in line with the rest of US sentencing, which is equally harsh. Just keep in mind: 9 years in jail for multi-million dollar fraud, not 9 years in jail for bulk advertising.

Jedidiah.

Several questions worth considering

[mikew03 (186778)]

1) Why aren't Visa/Mastercard/AMEX/Etc... also liable in cases like this? It seems like we could put a huge brake on Spam if the credit card companies had some responsibility? Also why would the bank cards tolerate this anyway, the chargeback rate must have been enourmous.

2) How did he hook into the internet with 5 high speed lines that did nothing but send email all day? Surely this traffic could be detected and blocked at the source.

3) How come spam doesn't burn out like a pyramid scheme? Surely the number of gullible people are finite. All of these spammers use the same lists. There has to be a point where every single person spammable has been reached. And surely by the gigantic volume we all get we must be close to that point.

Penalty for spammers

[Zathras26 (763537)]

How does this sound?

Spammers don't get a fixed prison sentence. Instead, you put them in a prison cell that has an electronic lock with a keypad inside the cell. The combination is, say, twelve digits long, so there's no way in hell the prisoner can ever guess it.

Now you give the spammer a dumb terminal with shell access and an email account (incoming only) and no spam filtering. You send him the same amount of spam each day that he was sending out, except that one of the incoming emails will have the combination to the door. He has to find it himself. Until he can, he's stuck in the cell.

Poetic justice. Just as we regular users have to go to all this trouble with spam filtering and everything else, he'll have to go crazy looking for the combination that will allow him to regain his freedom.

Re:Who's counting?

[Rosco P. Coltrane (209368)]

$750k a month is better than I think 99.9% of this entire world's population. And to think... only 9 years in jail.

You're the second person in this thread who expresses this point of view. Interesting (and sad) society we live in were it's deemed an acceptable option to serve time in jail as a paid job...

Personally, I'd rather starve in the street than go one minute in jail. I couldn't bear the shame...

Re:Who's counting?

[G-funk (22712)]

Personally, I'd rather starve in the street than go one minute in jail. I couldn't bear the shame

Spoken like somebody who's never starved on the street.

Re:Who's counting?

[Billly Gates (198444)]

Hey there is also great shame of being poor and starving.

Especially if you have a wife and kids to feed.

How many ex-IT workers reading this agree? I feel shame going back to school at 27 and moving in with mom and dad again to pay the bills after companies decided not to hire Americans anymore for computer work.

Sure going to jail is bad but so is being abused by the consequences of capitalism.

I would never spam of course but if I had a kid and if my relationship with my gf became serious enough where sh

Re:Who's counting?

[Rosco P. Coltrane (209368)]

What shame? The shame of being wealthy for the remainder of your life without having to work again?

You illustrate my point very well, thank you.

Re:How does this work?

[YrWrstNtmr (564987)]

When someone actually pays for the products or services, do they not receive them or are the products received not as described?

The work-at-home 'offers' are merely "Here is a list of companies. Write to them and see if they'll hire you to work at home"

or stuffing envelopes. What you really end up doing is stuffing envelopes with "Here is how to make money stuffing envelopes. Please send $19.95"

Technically, what you've gotten is what you ordered. But what you ordered was not-quite-legal.

Re:How does this work?

[YrWrstNtmr (564987)]

Probably (more or less). If you order 'Penis Enlargement Cream" for $24.95, and get a tube of anonymous goo worth about $0.07, would you say that the order has been filled?

The other problem lies in getting a refund once you've figured out that you've been ripped off.
Mr. Jeremy Spammer isn't a wholesaler, but merely a cashier. He has no inventory. You send your money to him, he takes his cut and moves the order on the the actual seller. They send you the 'stuff'. You want your money back, but the only contact is who you sent the money to, Mr. Jeremy Spammer. He has since moved onto a different business name and contact info. You have little chance of getting a refund.

J. Spammer has his cut, the wholesaler has their cut, and you have a tube of goo.

They are lawbreakers, prosecute them

[antispam_ben (591349)]

I do not think they should be jailed as a criminal.

PLease read through the "Information about spam" llnks on this website, written at least eight years ago when spam was much less of a problem yet still as relevant today, and see you can still justify that statement:

http://spam.abuse.net/overview/

While that site also describes many peripheral issues involving content, the fact is, regardless of content, spam is theft of Internet services.

Lets face the fact, at least in America, advertising always find

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[freeweed (309734)]

For better or worse, if we live in a consumerist society, as we do, we will be exposed to advertising. How else will they let us know what we want to buy?

Quite possibly, the most damning indictment of the human condition I've ever seen.

You are mistaken.

[jcr (53032)]

These people *are* evil. They steal vast quantities of money in very small increments.

My point is, we as a society could profit form these people.

Maybe by selling them for medical experimentation?

eMail is not a right. The Internet is not a right.

Email is one use of my property, which it is my right to control. Spamming is not a free-speech issue, it's a property rights issue.

They haven't hurt anyone,

Try telling any ISP that's had to clean up after them that spammers haven't hurt anyone.

Why pay to jail these people.

Because capital punishment for spamming probably can't get sufficient public support.

-jcr

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[HeghmoH (13204)]

Spam is junk mail sent COD without the option to refuse payment. The fact that the incremental cost per spam is tiny doesn't matter; it's not zero, and these people send a tremendous volume of messages. The fact that the protocols are effectively designed to allow abuse doesn't matter either, because taking advantage of an inherently broken system in an illegal manner is still illegal. Last, most spammers (judging by the contents of my junk mail folder) are engaging in fraud to various degrees, such as ads

Tax spam? Won't work.

[cduffy (652)]

If it were just spam, maybe you'd have a point. Maybe. I don't think so, but there are other people arguing the point, so I'll leave it to them.

The key distinction you're missing is that this fellow was committing fraud -- promising people jobs (if they'd pay some money up-front) and giving them lists of completely useless information, among other things. Mass email was just the mechanism. His prosecution, thus, was totally legit -- on that point alone!

Taxing spam would be difficult. Folks who are willing

Re:It makes no difference.

[nikclev (590173)]

So you're telling me that you think you could teach the same poeple that would actually buy a P3N|S P(_)MP how to properly set up a good email filter? Tell you what.. you try that, I'll start up a spamming business, we'll see who is succesfull. I'm not trying to be an ass, just trying to be realistic.

Re:I wish ...

[Darth_Burrito (227272)]

I wish I could pull in between $30,000 and $750,000 per month while keeping my spending below $50,000 (per month).

I think I can help you out. Send me $50,000 every month and I will send you $30,000 back.

Shit, tomorrow's inbox...

[SnapShot (171582)]

EARN $300,000 to $750,000 PER MONTH working from the PRIVACY of your own HOME!!!!
JEREMY JAMES did IT, SO CAN YOU!!!!!!!
THIS is NOT a SCAM, It REALLY works!!!!!
FOR MORE information MAIL TO make_millions.com

Re:Think of the Trees

[Dimensio (311070)]

If he had been using paper junk mail, then he would have had to pay to send out his garbage, rather than stealing the resources of others.

Spammers actually have used "save the trees" as a justification in the past. They try to distract attention away from the fact that what they do is theft, period.

Re:Think of the Trees

[HeghmoH (13204)]

That is a nonsensical argument. If it were conducted via normal paper-based mail, the volume wouldn't be anywhere near as high.

Re:Think of the Trees

[fr2asbury (462941)]

I'm not scoffing, but think of the postage. Assuming that he could get by with the minimum first class postage, to send out ten million pieces of junk mail a day, would cost him over a hundred million dollars per month, in postage alone. I know the mail system is closed on Sundays, but I'm assuming that he sent spam on Sundays and no one can stop him from putting mail in the box on Sunday (except the vast number of pieces). Also he might be able to get some bulk mail discount, I don't really know how that works, but it would still be a lot. Now add to that paper, envelopes, printing and the resources to stuff and post. On his best month he made $700,000. He'd go broke in a heart beat trying to do that by regular mail.

Re:ISP suspicion?

[Antique Geekmeister (740220)]

It's called a "pink contract", a business contract with the clauses that normally forbid business like spamming carefully left out. They're quite common for struggling ISP's, which normally make sure the bandwidth is paid for up front. agis.net did this for quite some time with Cyberpromo, until the crackers took their routers down and kept them down until Cyberpromo went offline. But it took almost 2 years to get people worked up enough that the crackers would do this.

Re:Human beings are dumb

[nacturation (646836)]

And PT Barnum's top competitor said, "There's a sucker born every minute."

I've pretty much lost hope for the species.

Is that why in your sig you're promoting a "free flat screen" to those suckers? Or were you trying to maximize the irony of the whole situation?

Re:Disproportion of punishment to crime...

[dubl-u (51156)]

9 years in prison for what amounts to shoddy dealings. [...] Who was killed by Jeremy? Who was maimed by Jeremy? Who was raped by Jeremy?

I'm sure you think it's reasonable when a multiple murderer gets multiple sentences, right? Ok, good. Next decide what you think an appropriate sentence for stealing $40 is. Ready? Let's do some math.

The articles are lacking in hard numbers, but suppose that this guy ran his operation for a year, and that he averaged 10,000 suckers a month. That would mean 120,000 people defrauded. So 9 years would mean circa 39 minutes of time served per victim.

And that doesn't leave anything left over for the millions of people bothered by his spam, the millions of dollars in other people's resources he consumed, the time consumed in many months of tracking him down, or the harm done to the fabric of trust that makes internet commerce possible.

So no, turning him loose and saying, "Naughty naughty!" doesn't seem like appropriate punishment. Especially given that this guy was a hardcore scammer for years, one who set up more than 30 fake companies to hide his dealings.