Spammer in the Slammer: Jeremy Jaynes sentenced to nine years
Will other spammers pay attention? Don’t count on it.
Jeremy Jaynes was on top of the world. At 28, he owned a million-dollar house, a high-class restaurant, a chain of gyms, and plenty of other toys. However, those were just spoils from his main line of business, which was scamming innocent people out of his money through email scams. From an unassuming home that served as his company’s headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, Jaynes sent some 10 million messages a day featuring products most recipients didn’t want, amassing an estimated $24 million in fortune. process. Using aliases like Jeremy James and Gaven Stubberfield, Jaynes spammed as high as position 8 on Spamhaus’s Record of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) and raked in up to $750,000 per month, allowing him to live like a king.
However, Jaynes hit a roadblock on the information superhighway head-on when a Virginia judge sentenced him to nine years in prison for his November 2004 felony conviction of using false IP addresses to send mass advertisements. by email (some just call it spam). The conviction was a landmark decision, as Jaynes became the first person in the United States to be convicted of felony spam. Although his operation was based in North Carolina, Jaynes tried his hand at Virginia because it’s home to a large number of routers that handle much of North America’s Internet traffic (it’s also home to AOL and one or two government buildings). ).
I should have used privacy software
During the trial, prosecutors focused on three of Jaynes’s most egregious scams: software that promised to protect users’ private information; a service for choosing penny stocks to invest in; and a work-from-home “FedEx refund processor” opportunity that promised a $75-per-hour job but did nothing more than give shoppers access to a FedEx delinquent account website. Sounds familiar? Anyone with an email address has received countless messages from Jaynes’s operation. (If you’re still waiting for his privacy software to show up, it’s probably safe to stop checking the mailbox.)
Jaynes obtained lists of millions of email addresses through a stolen database of America Online customers. He also illegally obtained eBay user email addresses. While prosecutors still don’t know how Jaynes gained access to the lists, the Associated Press reported that the AOL names matched a list of 92 million addresses that an AOL software engineer has been accused of stealing.
When Jaynes’s operation was raided, investigators discovered that the house from which he ran his operation was connected to 16 T-1 lines (a large office building may be served by a single T-1 line for all of its users). Investigators also entered evidence into Jaynes’s handwritten task lists. Take a look at Jeremy Jayne’s meticulously detailed lists at:
* http://www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes1.JPG
* http://www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes2.JPG
* http://www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes3.JPG
Good job if you can get away with it
The spam economy makes Jaynes’ decision to build a career understandable, if not noble. Spammers work by the law of averages, which would seem like an odd strategy considering that the average response rate for a spam message is only one-tenth of one percent. However, once he does the math, even this small response rate can make one very rich very quickly. If a spammer sends a million messages earning $40 per product width, a response rate of 0.1 percent equates to 1,000 customers, or $40,000 per million messages sent. Since each message costs only fractions of a cent to send, and Jaynes was sending literally billions of messages a year, it’s easy to see how he raised $400,000 to $750,000 per month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead. .
The fact that spam can be such a profitable business means that the profession is not likely to go anywhere in the near future. Spammers are financially motivated to come up with innovative ways to avoid detection and have started to join forces. While the landmark decision handed down in the Jaynes trial may serve as a deterrent to some would-be spammers, the threat of prosecution is unlikely to stop future spammers from perfecting their business. For now and for the foreseeable future, the answer still lies in technology, not law enforcement.