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.'"
Who's counting? (Score:1, Insightful)
C.R.E.A.M (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:There's one spammer born every second, too (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Peoply who respond to spam... (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Who's counting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Spoken like somebody who's never starved on the street.
These People Are Not Evil (Score:1, Insightful)
Perhaps monatary fines, like 40% of their income would be fair? This money could be put into national programs to make our internet faster and modernize as many facets as possible. This would benefit all people who use the internet, for obvious reasons.
If the spammers try and lie about their income, they would of course be tried criminaly, etc for all business malpractices.
My point is, we as a society could profit form these people. Lets face the fact, at least in America, advertising always finds its way into every media medium, and the Internet is no different. 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?
eMail is not a right. The Internet is not a right. Why pay to jail these people. They haven't hurt anyone, and really are running an innovative business, as far as marketing is innovative. No matter what, a spammer taken off the Net today will be replaced by another yesterday. It's a battle you cannot win. The current solution is not creative or well considered. Let's tax it and invest it in ourselves.
Re:Who's counting? (Score:3, Insightful)
You illustrate my point very well, thank you.
Re:It makes no difference. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You've got mail! (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
They are lawbreakers, prosecute them (Score:3, Insightful)
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 finds its way into every media medium, and the Internet is no different.
That's what banner ads on websites are. People pay the website owners to put those ads on their sites. Spam is different.
Re:It makes no difference. (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:These People Are Not Evil (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh, that's a simply smashing idea!
"Sure, go ahead. Steal from thousands of server administrators and users, commit credit card fraud, and so forth. And if you get caught, charged, prosecuted AND convincted, we'll make you give back... uh, say, a little less than half of it. But you can keep the rest, and there's no jail time, so you can do it again immediately if you want.
Awesome deterent. You sure you hate spam? Because I think it's more likely that you're a spammer yourself with this idea. Either that, or just a moron.
Humanity (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:It makes no difference. (Score:1, Insightful)
Is this supposed to be funny?
Re:Think of the Trees (Score:3, Insightful)
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:These People Are Not Evil (Score:3, Insightful)
Spam is not legitimate advertising. All you have to do to realize this is compare spam with other advertising. Normal advertising makes it very clear that it is, in fact, advertising, it clearly indicates the product being advertised, and it clearly indicates the organization doing the advertising. Spam, on the other hand, actively tries to disguise itself as personal e-mail, actively hides its source by doing things like forging e-mail headers, and often actively hides the product it is advertising by merely providing a link to a web site with no explanation of what it is. If spam really were legitimate advertising, spammers would not be doing any of this.
Re:Think of the Trees (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Think of the Trees (Score:5, Insightful)
Idiots? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those "idiots" often being trusting elderly people who don't know any better,perhaps your mother, your father, your grandmother.
Re:parasites (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, I'm scratching my head on this one. Bush is President. A spammer just got 9 years in prison for spamming. So I guess the answer is yes?
Re:You are mistaken. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahh, capital punishment, when 9 years of anal rape bundled with HIV and Hepatitis infection isn't enough.
Call me insensitive to your plight or whatever, but cleaning up a couple emails fucking pales in comparison to what this guy will experience in prison.
People get less time for murder.
Murder.
If you can't comprehend the difference, I really don't know how to explain it to you. I doubt you could even comprehend the difference.
And please, before you start, fuck off with the "billion spams x seconds = more than one lifetime arguement". Again, you probably can't comprehend this.
Oh, he has a somewhat good chance of catching HIV and dying of AIDS, (or even getting beat to death on whim) so just to satisfy your sense of vengance, you probably got your capital punishment.
How many years would Jesus do? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ISP suspicion? (Score:4, Insightful)
And Ken Lay is still free... (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess the lesson here is that it's better commit fraud publicly on a massive scale -- and have friends in high places -- then it is to commit fraud quietly from your back bedroom.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Human beings are dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
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:The sentencing (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Depends (Score:2, Insightful)
Some rough assumptions below to show how effective filtering will be. You assume that everyone will have that type of filter. Here are my assumptions for now. Assume that 20% have no filter, could be high, could be low. Another 50% have an inefficient filter, removes 50%. Another 20% have 95% efficiency. And the last 10% has 99.99% efficiency. Rough guesses and large margin of error. With those assumptions, out of 10000 emails, 4601 get through. People using filters are probably (an assumption, but reasonable) more likely not to waste their money
This brings you to the fool and his money ratio (how many emails that get through it takes to get one to send money) Hard to say with any accuracy, but the lead-in stated 30000 emails, assuming all got through. Maybe the fool and money ratio is closer to 20000 emails. So he would have to send closer to 50000 emails to get 1 money response due to filters.
The key for stopping spammers really isn't better filters. It's getting the clueless users to use them. Out of those 4601 emails that got thru, 4500 were in the classes with no or weak filtering. Those people move to the 90% filtering rate, the total goes to 801 emails, a vast reduction. You attack the problem from the other end, those who use better filters already and use a perfect filter and the total drops down to 4500. Spam filtering in the basic user email programs may be the best way to combat spam. For those who want choices, different programs for power users. But in the end it comes down to the fool and money ratio. As long as those people have access to the internet, spammers will be able to find them and part them from their money.
Re:Idiots? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:parasites (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be a great day indeed when our only complaint about the American Justice Department is that it didn't prosecute spammers agressively.
Jeremy
Re:Who's counting? (Score:1, Insightful)
It's not a matter of shame.
First of all, you're exaggerating and people are being distracted. It's not about going to prison or starving in the street. People who are looking at starving in the street don't have the opportunity to spam on this level. You need a huge initial investment to do this.
But it's not about shame, or about punishment. It's about making sacrifices so that we can survive as a society. Fraud is not illegal because it carries a prison sentence, it's illegal because it's harmful to society. If fear of punishment is your only deterrant, you are lacking as a person.
Ok, maybe it is about shame, but not shame for the punishment, shame for the act. The law metes out penalties based on arbitrary human rules, not some perfect morality. You can go to prison for things that are morally just. You can do things that are morally wrong and remain innocent in the eyes of the law. (because the laws are shared by many people, and it's hard to come to a concensus about morality) So the penalty says nothing about how shameful the act was.
Spending 9 years in jail, that's not shameful. Harrassing a vast number of people and harming others for your own benefit, that is shameful.
Disproportion of punishment to crime... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Sure, fraud isn't nice, but wouldn't a more effective punishment, and deterrent for others, be to simply take away everything he's bought and accrued?
All money? Gone. All property? Gone. Divide it up and spread it around his home state's health and education services.
Make him bankrupt and let him get back on his feet like any other poor person with the threat hanging over his head that if he does one more illegal thing to do with fraud or money, then into prison he goes for a couple of years.
Murder, Rape, Arson, Assault with a Deadly Weapon, Armed Robbery... Things that actually do people or property physical harm can get less time than this.
His sentence isn't justice, it's ego-driven revenge.
Re:And Ken Lay is still free... (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, I hope my cynicism is misplaced this time, but savings and loan debacle of the eighties left me a bit jaded. They finally convicted a few of the high profile racketeers, but only sent them to a country club prison for a couple of years.
Before you knew it, they were out writing books and teaching economics at the university. I doubt the outcome will be much different this time. I hope I'm wrong.
Re:There's one spammer born every second, too (Score:1, Insightful)
My dad, the other day got a mail from earthlink, or so he thought, and was actually smart enough to call me. I asked him to forward it to me, and lo and behold, its a link to some computer in china (undoubtedly a r00ted box) with a conveniant form so that you can "update" your account information before you get kicked off the net, as the letter threatened, and I forwarded the mail to earthlink's abuse box.
Now, my dad ain't the brightest bulb on the christmas tree, and he did the right thing, but I could easily see elderly or even stupider folks falling for this. It looked authentic enough, and the address even came from earthlink.com (not net--which is a clue), and golly gee they copied earthlink's form to the tee (except that they also requested a SSN...ouch.)
And all they have to do is mine the net and send form emails that appear to be from comcast, or aol, or whomever the target seems to be connected with.
Re:Disproportion of punishment to crime... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
That's the real difference (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not the case with spam. People don't want it, in fact even most of those that buy from it hate it (they are just suckers). Also there aren't huge returns per spam, just a large volume of it.
So if the returns can be reduced and the penalites increased, it is likely the amount will decrease significantly. You'll never get rid of it, but you'll make it unattractive enough that it'll be fairly scarce.
Education is the key (Score:2, Insightful)
Likewise the good old v1@gra and c1alis or whatever. Does granny really understand that h@x0r speak and decide to buy dodgy fake drugs from an almost unreadable spam? I don't think so. For those things we need something like a 60 minutes expose that the oldies can watch and be shocked into not buying again.
Let get it into the news and out of our inboxes!
What I want to know is.... (Score:1, Insightful)
That is to say, so okay, they caught HIM, but what about the [dozens of?] spam-friendly ISPs that accepted his 10-million-spams-per-day spew?? Who was it that sold him those 16 high-speed T1's, and thereafter immediately closed their eyes to what he was doing with them? That's what I want to know.
They're just as guilty as he is IMO.
In response to the ass-rape glee (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody deserves to be sexually abused. If you find torture exciting or a 'fitting' punishment, then you're a sadist.
Another thing to note is that he's not going to get gangbanged. Spamming is a non-violent crime. He'll get sent to a low-medium security prison.He's rich and that means he's protected in prison. All he has to do is pay the big man (if there is one at the country-club prison he goes to) a $100,000 a year and his ass will be protected 24/7/365. If there is no big man, he can buy himself a bodyguard or five.
And he'll get parole in 4 years unless he really misbehaves in prison.
He'll probably spend the next 4 years bored and wondering exactly how many ho's he'll bang and how many lines of coke he'll do, once he gets out. He'll probably be able to purchase both sex and drugs doing his time behind bars.