April 10, 2005

Judge Sentences Spammer to Nine Years

I mean I think I said that freaking Spammers should be locked up, but did I mean it?

Jaynes, 30, who was considered among the top 10 spammers in the world at the time of his arrest, used the Internet to peddle pornography and sham products and services such as a "FedEx refund processor," prosecutors said. Thousands of people fell for his e-mails, and prosecutors said Jaynes' operation grossed up to $750,000 per month.

Jaynes was convicted in November for using false Internet addresses and aliases to send mass e-mail ads through an AOL server in Loudoun County, where America Online is based. Under Virginia law, sending unsolicited bulk e-mail itself is not a crime unless the sender masks his identity.

While prosecutors presented evidence of just 53,000 illegal e-mails, authorities believe Jaynes was responsible for spewing out 10 million e-mails a day. Prosecutors said Jaynes made millions of dollars from the illegal venture.


This guy seems like just the type who should be prosecuted, but nine years seems rather steep to me. A guy shouldn't get nine years just for making us hit the delete key a few extra times. Of course it really seems that this guy was running a con, not just spamming.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't think the spamming itself would be worthy of 9 years, but the $750,000 a month he scammed people out of is worth at least that long in the slammer.

Anonymous said...

And you have to consider how many man-hours (actually, technically, I think it was man-weeks) of person-power he ate up as well with all those people sorting through his junk-mail. Additionally, there is the resource drain in bandwidth, server payload, memory, etc.

Personally, I think this guy does deserve to get hit with a charge of criminal Grand Spamming. But some of that is also because he managed to part so many people from their money (fraud).