As was mostly expected, North Carolina-based America Online spammer Jeremy Jaynes was sentenced to nine years in prison April 8, bringing to a close the first felony prosecution in the United States for spamming, under one of the toughest state anti-spam laws in the country—but the sentence was postponed pending an appellate ruling.
Jaynes and his sister, Jessica DeGroot, were convicted in early November 2004, in a case in which Jaynes was charged with pumping out at least 10 million spam messages a day through at least sixteen high-speed lines. DeGroot's conviction–based mostly on checks from her brother and a credit card in her maiden name–was tossed in early March on grounds of lack of evidence.
The Jaymes-DeGroot jury recommended nine years but even the trial judge, Thomas Horne, expressed reservations about the law under which the two were convicted. Jaymes's attorney, David Oblon, has argued that there was no proof the spam messages in question were unsolicited and had hoped to get his client a lower sentence. Prosecutor Lisa Hicks-Thomas said, however, that the sentence was satisfactory and Virginia's anti-spam law was likely to stand on appeal.
Oblon disagrees. "We have no doubt," he said outside court following the sentencing hearing, "that we will win on appeal." But even if he does, Jaynes–who didn't talk to reporters after the hearing, and is free under $1 million bond–may have done the cyberspace world a big favor anyway, assuming he keeps a vow he was quoted as making during the hearing: "I can guarantee the court that I will not be involved in the e-mail marketing business again."
Sending spam by itself is no crime even under the tough Virginia law unless the spammer hides his or her identity, which Jaymes was believed to have done under the identity of Gaven Stubberfield and other aliases. Spam-fighting group Spamhaus had had him listed prominently among the world's most notorious spammers and spam suspects, and his prosecutors likewise called him one of the world's top 10 spammers.
At its height, the Jaynes operation was simpler than those run by spammers who use worms and spyware to turn remote computers into spamming zombies. Peddling anything from porn to software and work-at-home schemes involving penny stocks to Federal Express refund processing, Jaynes was believed to use fake contact and company information while registering websites, fake routing information in headers, and fake domain names identifying servers through which he flushed his spam, beating filters and making it hard to track him.
Jaymes and DeGroot were prosecuted under Virginia's law because they used America Online, reached out to AOL customers, and the company is based in Dulles, Virginia. The Jaymes operation was believed to be earning as much as $750,000 per month before the siblings were prosecuted.
