Meet Millionaire Spammer Jeremy Jaynes 379
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.'"
FYI, if you don't RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
Mind you, the spammer will know that people are idiots
Some additional details... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1828341p-8
Yes - they were T1 lines.
Re:There's one spammer born every second, too (Score:5, Informative)
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:How does this work? (Score:5, Informative)
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:It makes no difference. (Score:2, Informative)
I've been using it for months for various customers in production networks. Free, written in Perl and runs on *nix or Windows. Can integrate with just about any mail server. I use it with Exchange. It also uses clamAV to do some basic virus filtering.
Re:There's one spammer born every second, too (Score:4, Informative)
9 Years is Not Enough (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:9 years in jail is too light... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How does this work? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:The sentencing (Score:1, Informative)
Re:parasites (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:The sentencing (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong. He also committed fraud. He was selling products that he knew didn't do what he said they did.
Re:How does this work? (Score:2, Informative)
Apparently, some of them are also basically money laundering for the Russian mob. They aren't terrible as work-at-home jobs go, but highly illegal.
Re:The sentencing (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:And Ken Lay is still free... (Score:3, Informative)
First the prosecutors went after Ben Glisan, Enron's treasurer. He's now Federal inmate #20293-179 at FDC Houston and is scheduled for release in 2008.
Once Glisan talked, the prosecutors went after Andrew Fastow, Enron's CFO, and his wife, who helped with those "offshore entities". She's now inmate #20290-179 at FDC Houston and is scheduled for release in 2005. Andrew Fastow has pled guilty and is "cooperating with prosecutors", which will affect the length of his sentence. So he gave up Ken Lay. Andrew Fastow will still do quite a few years in prison; the original indictment specified over a thousand years.
Lay, Skilling, and Causey go on trial together in March 2005. We'll probably have a few more inmate numbers after that.