Siblings Guilty of Spam Felony, Partner Acquitted

saikou writes "According to AP Story (via SF Chronicle), brother and sister spammers just got convicted 'in the nation's first felony prosecution of distributors of spam,' while third suspect was acquitted. Jurors moved on to figuring out appropriate punishment (please, please, please give them some jail time. Pretty please). More spam cases for Virgina?"

Comments

The family that spams together

[Anonymous Coward]

Goes to the slammer together.

Yes, 9-Year Prison Term

[fembots]

Prosecutors did ask the jury to impose a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison for Jaynes, and to consider an unspecified prison term for his sister.

However like the article already mentioned, jurors who convicted Jeremy D. Jaynes, 30, and Jessica DeGroot, 28, later sentenced Jaynes to a nine-year prison term and fined DeGroot $7,500 for three convictions each of sending e-mails with fraudulent and untraceable routing information.

Now it's a matter of protecting/preserving those sentences because the defending lawyer claims the prison term is an excessive punishment, given that this is the first prosecution under the Virginia law. He also noted that his client, a North Carolina resident, would have been unaware of the Virginia law. If they dare to appeal, prosecutors should appeal to increase the prison term to the maximum too!

--
Play iCLOD Virtual City Explorer and win Half-Life 2

Re:Yes, 9-Year Prison Term

[evn]

However like the article already mentioned, jurors who convicted Jeremy D. Jaynes, 30, and Jessica DeGroot, 28, later sentenced Jaynes to a nine-year prison term

I hate spam as much as the next guy but 9 years is a bit excessive IMO. I did a quick bit of googling to figure out what sort of sentences people get for other crimes in Virginia (because this was so out of alignment with how people are sentenced in Alberta) and I found this:

COMMONWEALTH v. Milton Tanner

On March 22, 2002, this defendant received ten years to serve for Rape, two counts of Carnal Knowledge and Taking Indecent Liberties with a minor.

From this city of Norfolk page

Yes we need to crack down on online frauds, spam, worms, et al as much as the next guy but I really don't think that sending spam should carry (roughly) the same penalty as a rape conviction. Looking at these sentences our court is either saying "Sending spam is a horrific a crime as rape" or "Rape is no more worse than sending spam."

15 years is the sentence handed out in a rape & sexual battery conviction involving a minor. This doesn't sit right.

Re:Yes, 9-Year Prison Term

[Chandon Seldon]

Rape is generally accepted as being a horrible crime - everyone knows it's horrible, and normal people just don't do it. Basically if someone is committing rape, it's a good indication that they're eithor mentally unstable or otherwise are not considering the results of their action. The difference between 15 years in prision and like 50 years for rape would be pretty minimal, and keeping it shorter allows for some chance of the criminal becoming a useful member of society at some point in the future.

Spamming is a non-violent but financially costly crime. Since it's never been a criminal act before, the people doing it don't have an innate feeling that they're doing something wrong - they don't understand that society is going to *put them in prision* if they're caught spamming.

The absolute best thing that could happen here would be for the judge to rule that the spammers get FIFTEEN YEARS IN PRISION (quietly, under breath: with possibility of parole in 6 months with good behaviour). That will give us a headline that will scare some of the other spammers, but will wreck the fewest people's lives.

Re:Yes, 9-Year Prison Term

[deblau]

Um. So if you read the Virginia statutes (which I can't get to right now, but are available here), you will see that under Va. Code 18.2-152.3:1, spamming is a class 1 misdemeanor, unless it's in bulk or makes the spammer a certain amount of money, in which case it's a class 6 felony. You will also see that under Va. Code 18.2-10(f), each class 6 felony carries with it a minimum of one year and a maximum of five, a penalty of up to $2,500, or both. For those keeping score, three counts gets you 3-15 years and up to $7,500. Jaynes got right down the middle at 9 years, and DeGroot lucked out of jail but got the maximum fine.

As for rape: Va. Code 18.2-61(C) says that rape gets you five years to life. It also says that 10 year olds can commit rape, but the Commonwealth will have to do extra work to prove it. Va. Code 18.2-63 gets you a class 4 felony for CK with a minor between 13 and 15, unless it's by consent, then it's a class 6 felony if there's a three year age difference, or a class 4 misdemeanor if not.

To sum up: spamming is a maximum misdemeanor, unless you're a real sleaze, in which case it's promoted to a minimum felony. Sex with a minor gets you a middling felony (2 to 10 years and up to $100,000), unless it's consentual, then it's demoted to a minimum felony. In other words, bulk spamming AOL is the same to the state of Virginia as consentual sex with a minor. Maybe you don't like that, but that's the way the scale works.

P.S. Under Va. Code 18.2-370.2, if you have sex with a minor, you can't hang around schools. If only bulk spamming meant you couldn't hang around the Internet...

Re:Yes, 9-Year Prison Term

[sanguine_shadow]

On the other hand... arbitrarily guaging sentences such as this just for the fear and shock value it will inflict on other would-be spammers is a negligent policy decision. Any sentence issued by the court should be meant to be carried out in full. If there are mitigating circumstances, that's where suspended sentence and parole should come into play.

I'm no fan of spam, but do we really need a special statute to deal with it? The people in this article used spam as a means to commit fraud. They should be tried for fraud. I don't care whether the fraud was an elaborate confidence scheme committed by a team of clever matchstick men going door-to-door pretending to take donations for the LDS, or some shmoe sitting in his parents' basement playing evercrack with one hand while lazily sending off spam with the other.(There's some nasty imagery in there somewhere) Fraud == Fraud... plain and simple. Spam is about pissing me off by filling my inbox with crap every day. What have I lost, really, by experiencing the email version of what I do every day when I come home from work.... sorting through the pile of mail trying to see if there is -Anything- even worth opening.

If some shmuck sends me email with "fraudulent and untraceable routing information," is my liberty affronted? If so, why?... because I can't easily reply? Of course I'll grant that spam is annoying, but so are infomercials... and calls from political parties... and people who drive neon yellow sports cars. Should we next tack on some fines for fraud committed while driving an ugly sports car?

Why waste time litigating the relatively meaningless incidentals when our public servants could focus on the core criminal act, resolve the issue, and move on to the next case in a more timely fashion?

Re:Yes, 9-Year Prison Term

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

On the other hand... arbitrarily guaging sentences such as this just for the fear and shock value it will inflict on other would-be spammers is a negligent policy decision.

It is?

In discussions like this, you have to start by establishing what the value/benefit of the prison system is. Is it to punish the criminals? Of course. But why?

Punishment in its own right won't undo many of the crimes that carry jail sentences. It's simply a sad fact that once a murder, rape, or other abuse has been committed, it's done, and nothing can change that. All you can do is try to prevent it happening again, by:

• removing from society someone who is expected to repeat the offence, and/or
• providing a deterrent for others who might commit the offence.

In the first case, you're talking about locking someone up for as long as it takes to mend their ways, potentially indefinitely. In the second, you're talking about providing a sufficient disincentive to prevent others feeling it's worth it to commit the crime.

In either respect, of course 9 years is far too long. These people aren't a danger to society; they're a pain in the arse. To encourage others not to be pains in the arse, a custodial sentence may be warranted, but throwing someone inside for 3-6 months should provide a sufficient kick up the backside for a first offence (on top of fining them 100% of the takings they made through the spamming, of course).

Something like 9 years is enough to destroy a life and make someone coming out turn to far darker things just to survive, which is not a productive use of the prison system from any point of view. Save long jail terms for the crimes so heinous that what we really want to do is lock someone up and throw away the key, where that scale of disincentive is required to inhibit further crimes by others, and keeping the perp off the streets for that long is necessary for public safety.

Not the first felony conviction for spam distribut

[Anonymous Coward]

A few years back, a guy stole a truckload of spam from a Hormel factory and got convicted of several felonies including distrubiting stolen spam.

Jail time?

[jrmann1999]

Is the editor seriously advocating jail time for spamming? I'm all for punishment, but I think taking every piece of property and dime of wealth is going to make a much bigger impact than sending them to a place that fosters the criminal mentality rather than reforming it. Reserve jail for hardcore felons that perform a physically harmful crime to someone else.

Re:They need jail time

[pyrrhonist]

Preferably, time in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

For a spelling mistake? That's a little harsh.

Felony conviction?

[autocracy]

I hope that the law they were convicted under had something to do with fraud written in it besides just sending untracable e-mail. Among all the other dumb things our country is doing, we're charging everything as a felony, no matter what the crime or reality behind it.

The credit card orders make this definitely a fraud case, but if that same punishment was applicable without the fraud... I can't lookup the law as the article doesn't mention it, but I'm very afraid.

Re:Please ?

[fireduck]

except in this case, the punishment is more for the fraud they committed, rather than just the presence of unsolicited junk mail. you advertise a product for $X and hundreds of people buy your product and it doesn't do Y as you promised, that's fraud. And that's probably why the punishments are as harsh as they are.

Re:Please ?

[mordors9]

But we do give jail time to thieves. The spammers are stealing a portion of the bandwidth that I am paying for.

Coed Prison?

[NotQuiteReal]

The family that spams togther Goes to the slammer together. This implies coed prison, since the family members cited are brother and sister.

Now that I have mentioned it, I trust Slashdotters will elaborate on the porn possibilities.

Hrm.

[Geekenstein]

On one hand, I see 9 years in jail for sending nuisance email as excessive punishment, but on the other, they were making money committing fraud.

Since, however, they were tried simply on sending spam and NOT fradulent sales, I find this very disturbing. If the law they were being tried on was sending junk mail, does the content of the mail actually matter under this law? Why would the judge allow that information to be even considered?

It's kind of like trying someone for stealing a car, and saying it's a worse crime because he had a crack rock in his pocket. Unless the law stipulated stronger punishment for having drugs in a stolen car, it should be left out of the case.

Appropriate sentence for spamming?

[RealAlaskan]

I wonder if we could get the ACLU to look the other way, just this once, so we could give them an appropriate sentence? Or maybe we could do something that's merely cruel: after all, the constitution prohibits ``cruel and unusual'' punishment, not ``cruel or unusual''. Cruel and usual is obviously ok.

What a pity Hannibal Lecter is a character in a movie. I'm pretty sure that an appropriate sentence should involve him, and a bottle of chianti.

Spammers are thieves at the very least

[Roadkills-R-Us]

What about theft? The total costs of spam are enormous, even without scams. Many, many millions of dollars per year.They suck up bandwidth and disk space, and waste millions of person-hours each year that could have bene used for something productive.

They steal bandwidth. They steal disk space. They steal our time, and time costs dearly. You can't replace it.

So until you can find a way to force them to pay restitution to everyone they've robbed, don't try to paint them as harmless.

Now add in scammers, pornographers, and all the other crap, and they deserve much, much worse than they're getting. What, you don't think porn matters? When it gets into my house, in front of me, or my wife, or my kids, it damn well matters. If you try to walk into my house and expose us to porn, you might very well leave in an ambulance if you aren't awfully quick on your feet.

Another Cliche?

[ackthpt]

The family that spams together .. Goes to the slammer together.

How about another cliche?

In one month alone, Jaynes received 10,000 credit card orders, each for $39.95, for the processor.

In other words, stupid is as stupid does.

10,000 people fell for it. Isn't that rather depressing? Ok, we probably saw vote counts for the election and wondered how so many people could be so wrong, but 10,000 people trying to order something for $40 advertised in spam, that tells you this isn't exactly a nation of rocket scientists.

You can't seriously fight spam until people stop being so damn stupid.

Re:Jail time?

[MotherSuperior]

Hey, look at it this way. Maybe after a few trips to a prison shower, enlarged penises might not sound like such an attractive prospect.