Slashdot Mirror
Virginia Arrests Man For Spamming
volpe writes "According to this Yahoo news story, Virginia arrested a North Carolina man for spamming in violation of a new state law. He was arrested Thursday afternoon in Raleigh, NC. The story is pretty fresh, so the news details are still pretty thin."
There's an interesting stat about Virginia, and why their anti-spam law seems to be more important than other states laws. 50% of internet traffic flows through the state, thanks to MCI and AOL being headquartered there.
They are right in saying that spam is harming these companies in their state and, strangely enough, have at least tried to do the right thing.
But why is the rum gone?
This guy is listed on spamhaus.
http://www.wtop.com/?sid=150989&nid=25
All it takes is having your address listed in plain text on a web page and it will likely be spider'ed into a list. If you post to newsgroups or archives mailing lists, be sure not to have it in your signature, even putting a single space somewhere in it should be enought to counter the bots. Studies have shown that this is the most common way that adresses are obtained. Although that was before they started using viruses to harvest the MS Address Books of all the windows users.
The man arrested, Jeremy Jaynes (aka Gaven Stubberfield, and Jeremy James), was listed as the worlds 8th worst spammer on http://www.spamhaus.org/index.lasso. Spamhaus is a site that tracks the activity of spammers around the world. It also lists USA,China,And South Korea as the worst spamming countries.
What are you people doing that spam is such a big issue for you?
Signup for email lists that have archives online with member email addresses visible. Sign up for any account on any board and fail to check the "do not sell my name" box, or do check it, it does not matter. The problem is that once your email address gets on the list that gets sold and resold, you are hosed. I don't get alot of SPAM, but I get alot more than I did. And I know it's because of a couple of publicly available list archives that got scraped.
There were more details in this article where the laws they allegedly broke are described. Evidently penalties are up to five years prison and $2500 fines for sending 10,000 messages in 24 hours or 100,000 messages in 30 days.
Also available at Wash Post
I at a k-12 school. Over 70% of our incoming email is spam. One user went on a 6 month sabatical and came back to find 35,000 spams in his inbox. But more important than the storage, bandwidth and PITA issues with spam is the content. In a sue-happy world you simply cannot have teachers in a classroom using email when it might contain porn, racist humor or anything else you wouldn't want a 6 year old to see.
No they don't they just get sued.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
States, nail 'em while you can! Individuals, sue 'em while you can! (the fed. law prohibits individuals from sueing spammers -- gotta love the GOP)
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
This is not at all the reason. Current constitutional law will allow the federal government to generally regulate commercial activity under the enumerated power of interstate commerce even if the activity itself didn't cross state lines (which in this case it does anyway) - if the activity itself can have a substantial effect on interstate commerce its fair game (and pretty much anything has a substantial effect - the courts won't strike it down if its a commercial activity).
The question here will be whether or not Congress wants to allow states to regulate spam as well - and the answer is yes (based on provisions in the recent federal spam bill). But if Congress wanted to they could probably completely keep the states from regulating spam.
Well, techinically, the maximum sentance would be 20 years. He is, afterall, being charged on four separate violations, each carrying a 1 to 5 year sentance. So he could be out in as little as 4 years, assuming he is found guilty on all 4 charges. Not to mention that, with good behaviour, parole, etc, he'll probably be out in 1 to 2. The 20 year figure, is really just an outside number, its not likely, but is created because of the multipul counts against him. Not to mention that the district attorney is probably doing a standard, throw every possible thing at them, and see what sticks. Relax, its not as bad as the quick blurb made it out to be.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
That's no maiden, that's the Greek goddess of valor, you insensitive clod.
They took the time to write a press release on it
p ress_view.cfm?release_num=55253670
Blatantly ripped from: http://media.aoltimewarner.com/media/newmedia/cb_
---
America Online Works With Virginia Attorney General in First Criminal Indictments Under Virginia's Anti-spam Law
Evidence Referred by AOL Members Helps Law Enforcement Apprehend Individual Identified as a 'Top 10' Worldwide Spammer*
DULLES, VA - December 11, 2003 - Junk emailers across the country, take note: spamming can be hazardous to your freedom.
That's the message sent out today by Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore from AOL corporate headquarters in Northern Virginia, where he announced the first-ever felony indictment under Virginia's tough anti-spam law, which went into effect July 1st and is considered the toughest anti-spam law in the nation.
The indictment announced by the Commonwealth of Virginia charges a North Carolina resident with fraudulent or falsified transmission of unsolicited bulk e-mail, or "spam". According to the Attorney General's office, the defendant uses the alias "Gaven Stubberfield." According to the anti-spam organization Spamhaus (www.spamhaus.org), "Gaven Stubberfield" ranks number 8 on their "Top 10" Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO).
Using the "Report Spam" button, AOL members provided thousands of complaints that were used by the Commonwealth of Virginia to help investigate and indict the defendant.
"We applaud Attorney General Kilgore's swift action to vigorously enforce Virginia's tough anti-spam law. AOL, Virginia's online industry, and especially our millions of members, stand to benefit from their hard work," said Curtis Lu, Deputy General Counsel of AOL. "As part of AOL's comprehensive anti-spam enforcement strategy on behalf of our members, we have cooperated in Attorney General Kilgore's investigation of this defendant, and will continue to cooperate in actions brought both under Virginia's tough anti-spam law and also the new federal anti-spam law when it takes effect next year."
"Make no mistake about it," Lu continued: "Wherever you are in the country, no matter what state you live in - if you use techniques of falsification to spam AOL and its members, you can face stiff consequences under Virginia law. When AOL members use the 'Report Spam' button to provide spam complaints to AOL, they empower both law enforcement and AOL to take decisive action to hold spammers accountable for unlawful transmission techniques. Spammers who use outlaw tactics of falsification may find themselves behind jail bars instead of computer screens."
Joining Attorney General Kilgore and Mr. Lu at the press conference were industry leaders from MCI and the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC), as well as state prosecutors and investigators involved in the case.
In 2002 and early 2003, AOL worked with industry leaders, state lawmakers, and Attorney General Kilgore's office to craft a new anti-spam state law that would levy strong criminal penalties on large-scale spammers who used tactics of fraud, falsification and deceit to send the most egregious and offensive junk emails to AOL members. After adoption of the law by the Virginia General Assembly, AOL hosted a ceremony at its corporate headquarters on April 29th where Governor Mark Warner signed the bill.
The criminal indictment announced today comes as AOL continues to vigorously pursue civil litigation filed earlier this year against over a dozen individuals alleged to have spammed AOL members with almost one billion junk emails.
* according to www.spamhaus.org
About America Online, Inc.
America Online, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc. Based in Dulles, Virginia, America Online is the world's leader in interactive services, web brands, Internet technologies and e-commerce services
To prove it, here's the houses that Jeremy Jaynes owns.. bling bling..
As a fellow NC resident of Cary and a worker in Raleigh, I'm happy to see Virginia root out the Raleigh Spamming Gang out of my community and workplace.
Here's an article from my local paper.