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.'"
There's one spammer born every second, too (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Who's counting? (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Some quick math: (Score:5, Interesting)
$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
Re:It makes no difference. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:There's one spammer born every second, too (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
what about the $? (Score:2, Interesting)
so..
will he still be a millionaire when he gets out of jail?
is he serving his sentence in min-sec alongside martha stewart?
maybe i should re-think my long-term investments, I could do 9 min-sec years for a few mil.
Depends (Score:5, Interesting)
Now there's been stories on
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry thing is, the same people will probably fall for these as fell for this guy's scam.
parasites (Score:4, Interesting)
"Think of the CHILDREN!" (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry, I don't have mod points right now, and I'd rather reply to these comments anyway.
While most will probably scoff at what I'm saying (mod me down, but read first if you don't mind), can you imagine the number of trees had this been a junk-mail business?
1. If it had been junk mail through the USPS, the sender would have paid for those threes, as well as the cost of turning them into paper, the ink, the copywriter (when you spend real money on real advertisements, it's worth it to make it professional), AND the postage.
2. Trees used to make paper are a renewable resource. They don't make paper from old-growth hardwoods from rain forests.
3. Spam is extra-low-cost advertising to the spammer. Getting spams inso email inboxes is a few orders of magnitude lower in cost than getting the same number of flyers (legally) into the same number of postal mailboxes. There's no comparison: Spammers would not bother if they had to pay what it costs, even with USPS bulk rate and advertising rate, to send their messages through the USPS.
Re:It makes no difference. (Score:2, Interesting)
I won't be too specific on what kinds of filters I use (because otherwise I would be giving spammers hints on how to circumvent them), but basically weird things that shouldn't go on regular E-mail messages are easy to spot and filter. First of all: almost all spam comes as HTML formatted E-mail. Having that in mind you can start filtering out strange things such as border thicknesses around pictures and tables, form tags, unordered and ordered listings, images inside hyperlinks, input and form tags, frames, iframes, and whatever else you find inappropriate for regular E-mail messages. For plain-text spam you can simply filter out words such as "revenue", "furnish", "\$[0-9.]{3}", "MIL?ION.*DOL?ARS", etc. Last but not least, remember to filter out certain MIME types such as "binary/octet-stream" and file extensions such as ".exe", ".com", ".bat", ".vbs", ".pif", etc.
Remember that these are just knee-jerk hints based on my own experience. I recommend you to read your E-mail sources carefully in order to find patterns which allow you to clearly track and filter spam. What you filter depends on you and your company's needs and policies, so I recommend you to redirect messages to a spamdrop account instead of filtering them all right away to make sure there aren't false positives in the first few months. If the filters do well, replace your REDIRECT rules by a REJECT ones and enjoy your new quite mailbox.
Tax spam? Won't work. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 to commit fraud (as most spammers are) and hide their identities (as most spammers do) aren't likely to shake at the thought of a bit of tax evasion. And if you were to implement it somehow, and make it stick -- how do you distribute the money? Much of the internet's infrastructure is privately owned; would you give it to the involved companies, and ask them to be nice and please spend it on modernization? Would you use it to upgrade government-owned 'net usage? What good does that do to folks not getting their access via a
If you've got the ability to find and prosecute these folks for tax evasion (as you must have to make a tax stick), you've got the ability to find and prosecute them for fraud, or sending unsolicited commercial email, or anything else. Declaring a pretend tax to legitimize spam is useless as an antispam measure, and likely to do more harm than good.
The sentencing (Score:4, Interesting)
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'.
Yes, they're evil. (Score:1, Interesting)
Perhaps monatary fines, like 40% of their income would be fair?
I would consider anything less than 100% unfair.
They haven't hurt anyone, and really are running an innovative business, as far as marketing is innovative.
If spamming is an "innovative business", then so is stealing radios out of parked cars and selling them.
My point is, we as a society could profit form these people.
No, we can't. The profit spammers make is less than the cost of spam to everyone else on the internet.
No matter what, a spammer taken off the Net today will be replaced by another yesterday. It's a battle you cannot win.
That's true for any criminal. It doesn't mean we need to replace the whole justice system with a 40% tax on crime.
Several questions worth considering (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Dont post such profits to slashdot! (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure there will always be someone spamming our mailboxes, but put out the bait to the smartest bunch, and youve just made the world a miserable place (at least online).
The govt should post a reward of $700,000 for anyone who seeks and gets enough spammers to reduce online spam by 2% or something. Being on morality's side, greedy slashdotters could then clean up the Internet, at least in western countries.
Apprentice shows that spamming works (Score:2, Interesting)
The lesson? Spam works.