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Virginia Arrests Man For Spamming

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the don't-drop-the-soap dept.

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."

15 of 475 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting stat about Virginia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Loudoun Times Story by fdiskne1 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Since it was a Loudoun County grand jury who handed down the indictments, Loudoun Times has more details. According to their article:
    Kilgore made the announcement at America Online headquarters in Dulles, along with officials from AOL, MCI and UUNet.

    The state law makes spam criminal in Virginia if any part of the spam transactions occur in any Virginia locality. Kilgore said the spam in these two cases was sent "through servers located in Virginia."

    And while the announcement came in the gleaming AOL headquarters, Kilgore declined to be specific about the location of the servers in Loudoun County or provide further details, citing the coming prosecutions.

    Authorities in Raleigh, N.C., obtained a search warrant and arrested Jeremy Jaynes Thursday morning and charged him with four felony counts of using fraudulent means to transmit unsolicited, bulk e-mail in violation of the Virginia's anti-spam law, Kilgore said.

    Each felony count carries a punishment of one to five years in prison and a fine of up to $2,500, or both.

    Jaynes also goes by the aliases Jeremy James or Gaven Stubberfield, Kilgore said. The Register of Known Spam Operations lists Stubberfield as the eighth-most prolific spammer on its Web site www.spamhaus.com, according to Kilgore.

    The indictment alleges Jaynes sent spam that exceeded 10,000 e-mails per day on three separate days in July, and that he sent more than 100,000 e-mails during a 30-day period in July and August, Kilgore said.

    The state law makes it a felony to send unsolicited, bulk e-mail by fraudulent means such as removing the sender information, thus preventing recipients from replying or knowing who sent the e-mail. The spam is illegal if the volume exceeds 10,000 e-mails in 24 hours or 100,000 in 30 days, or if the revenue from the spam exceeds $1,000 or if the total revenue from the spam transmitted to any Internet service provider exceeds $50,000.
    --
    But why is the rum gone?
  3. AP view of this story. by jlancaster · · Score: 3, Informative

    This guy is listed on spamhaus.

    http://www.wtop.com/?sid=150989&nid=25

  4. Re:Good by pyros · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  5. More Info by jetkust · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:Good by AnonymousNoMore · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  7. More details by powerbarr · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  8. Story at Wash Post by EaglesNest · · Score: 2, Informative

    Also available at Wash Post

  9. Re:Good by Jjeff1 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:Man arrested for spamming by Hungus · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
  11. Re:Sic Semper Spammeris by Rick+the+Red · · Score: 2, Informative
    Relax. This and all other state anti-spam laws are void as of Jan. 1 (I believe; I don't know for sure, but it's soon) when the new federal law takes effect.

    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.
  12. Re:Sic Semper Spammeris by tonythepony · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  13. Re:Sic Semper Spammeris by Sylver+Dragon · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  14. Re:Sic Semper Spammeris by omarius · · Score: 2, Informative

    That's no maiden, that's the Greek goddess of valor, you insensitive clod.

  15. Spam is a money maker.. by bmike78 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.