Citing insufficient evidence that she herself smothered America Online users with spam, a judge threw out Jessica DeGroot’s conviction under Virginia’s tough new spam law—while upholding the conviction of her brother, Jeremy Jaynes, for the same crimes.
Loudon County Circuit Judge Thomas D. Horne said at a March 1 hearing that he thought the trial jury got “lost” while plowing through complex technological evidence as well as conjugating that new state spam law, and that there was no “rational basis” to find DeGroot herself guilty in the case.
DeGroot would not have been looking at anything more than a $7,500 fine for her reputed role in the Jaynes case, which involved using fake Internet addresses to spam AOL subscribers in July 2003.
The prosecution had argued that a credit card in DeGroot’s maiden name and checks from her brother to herself tied her to the scheme. But DeGroot’s attorneys argued that another “Jessica Jaymes” could have gotten hold of a credit card. “The jury did not convict a person,” said DeGroot’s attorney, Thomas Mulvine, in court. “They convicted a name on checks and a credit card.”
DeGroot’s brother wasn’t even close to being as successful as she before Horne. Jaynes’s conviction stood in spite of his attorney arguing that the spamming he was accused of doing didn’t actually originate from Virginia.
Jaynes and DeGroot had been convicted under Virginia's law even though they lived and operated from Raleigh, North Carolina because the spam was flushed through a Virginia-headquartered company.
Jaynes was believed to have gotten his target addresses through a stolen AOL database and from eBay, though it still isn’t clear how he did the latter. The AOL database is believed to have matched the now-notorious list of 92 million e-mail addresses stolen by a former AOL software engineer.
At the height of his scheme, Jaynes—known also as Gavin Stubblefield—was believed to have flushed at least ten million spam messages a day through sixteen high-speed lines, grossing up to $750,000 a month.
Jaynes was peddling products from porn to software and work-at-home schemes, but authorities believe very few if any actually bought the products in question through those spam messages. Prosecutors said he would still earn $40 per response just making money on one out of 30,000 messages, receiving between 10,000-17,000 credit card orders, equal to his earning between $450,000-750,000 a month while spending $50,000 on bandwidth and overhead.
A third defendant in the Jaynes case, Richard Rutkowski, was acquitted, after the trio’s trial ended in early November.
Jaynes’s attorney, David Oblon, hopes to get a lesser sentence for his client than the nine years recommended by the trial jury. He has argued that there was no proof Jayne’s e-mails were unsolicited and that nine years is too harsh a sentence for a nonviolent crime.
