Two North Carolina siblings who spammed millions of America Online e-mail users have been convicted in the first felony prosecution of spammers in the United States.
Jeremy Jaynes and his sister Jessica DeGroot were convicted on three counts of sending email with fraudulent and untraceable routing information, but the jury recommended strikingly distinct punishment for the two: nine years in prison for Jaynes while fining DeGroot $7,500. The siblings were convicted under a Virginia anti-spam law believed to be one of the toughest in the nation
"Spam is a nuisance to millions of Americans,” Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore said in a statement, “but it is also a major problem for businesses large and small because the thousands of unwanted e-mails create havoc as they attempt to conduct business."
Jaynes and DeGroot were believed to have made $24 million by spamming products like fake Federal Express refund processing work-at-home businesses, penny stock predictors, and Internet history erasers, among other schemes.
“This is a snakeoil salesman in a new format,” prosecutor Gene Fishel said in court.
Co-prosecutor Russell McGuire told the court Jaynes had been “ripping people off” for several years.
AOL at this writing had not yet commented on the Jaynes and DeGroot convictions. A third defendant, Richard Rutkowski, was acquitted.
The prosecution actually wanted 15 years in prison for Jaynes but the defense denounced it as an inappropriate request for excessive punishment, telling the court this was the first prosecution under Virginia’s anti-spam law and that the siblings would not have been aware of the law since they lived in North Carolina.
“Nine years,” said defense attorney David Oblon, “is absolutely outrageous, when you look at what we do to people convicted of crimes like robbery and rape.” The prosecution did ask for far lesser jail time for DeGroot, admitting she didn’t have anything close to her brother’s culpability in the spam schemes.
Virginia Circuit Court Judge Thomas Horne does have the option to cut any sentence or leave it intact when the two are sentenced in February. But during the brief trial Horne said he “had a hard time” even letting the case go to the jury. For his part, Jaynes is said to expect the conviction to be turned aside in due course, with Oblon possibly preparing a First Amendment-based appeal if the verdict isn’t set aside.
Oblon also suggested that AOL itself had practically taken over the prosecution of the case, if not buying and paying for it. He seemed rankled over numerous AOL workers testifying during the trial, and he was said to have alluded often enough to Kilgore announcing the indictments at an AOL headquarters press conference.
