Convicted spammer Jeremy Jaynes flushed cyberspace with at least 10 million spam messages a day through 16 high-speed lines and grossed as much as $750,000 a month, at the height of the operation that made him the first known conviction under Virginia's tough new anti-spam law.
Jaynes will be sentenced in February, with a jury having recommended nine years behind bars and his attorney David Oblon vowing to appeal his conviction. Oblon has said that while Jaynes is indeed a bulk emailer, the Virginia law is poorly written, the prosecution never actually proved Jaynes's spams were unsolicited, and the Virginia law itself infringes free speech. The trial judge has already suggested he might call for a review of the law.
“Nine years,” said Oblon of the jury's sentencing recommendation, “is absolutely outrageous, when you look at what we do to people convicted of crimes like robbery and rape.”
Jaynes' operation was simpler than those run by spammers who use various worms and spyware applications to turn random computers into spam-conducting zombies. He is believed to have provided fake contact and company information when registering for Web sites, making it difficult enough to track him, while also faking routing information in headers and generating fake domain names identifying the servers through which he flushed the messages, the better to beat spam filters, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors and trial records have said Jaynes peddled just about anything from porn to software and work-at-home scams and schemes, the latter involving anything from penny stock investing to Federal Express refund processing promising $75 per week. The problem, prosecutors said, was that that amounted only to victims getting access to a Website showing delinquent Federal Express accounts.
Jaynes apparently began as a porn purveyor known as Gaven Stubberfield and other false identities, but Virginia Assistant Attorney General Russell McGuire told the court and the press that he diversified almost as fast as he could, rotating products continuously.
"When you're marketing to the world," said McGuire, who prosecuted the trial of Jaynes and his sister, Jessica DeGroot, "there are enough idiots out there."
Jaynes was convicted under Virginia's law even though he lived and operated from Raleigh, North Carolina because he flushed his spam through America Online, which has headquarters in Dulles, Virginia. Jaynes is believed to have acquired email address lists by way of a stolen AOL database and from eBay, though just how he came by the latter is unknown. The AOL database reportedly matched a list of 92 million email addresses allegedly stolen by an AOL software engineer.
And though comparatively few actually fell for Jaynes' spams, 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. That, McGuire said, equaled between $450,000-750,000 a month while he spent $50,000 on bandwidth and overhead.
Published reports also indicated a videotape blocked from evidence during Jaynes' trial that showed him sitting at his equipment and bragging about it being spam headquarters, though sending email 24/7 apparently freed him to operate his "headquarters" without a staff.
