Meet Millionaire Spammer Jeremy Jaynes

prostoalex writes "Associated Press profiles Jeremy Jaynes, charged with sending out unsolicited e-mail messages, who just got a 9-year jail term recommendation from the state jury. With the help of 16 'high-speed' lines (Associated Press probably meant T1s) Jaynes would send out 10 million e-mails a day. His best month in terms of gross income netted him $750,000. Acccording to the article, 'In a typical month, prosecutors said during the trial, Jaynes might receive 10,000 to 17,000 credit card orders, thus making money on perhaps only one of every 30,000 e-mails he sent out. But he earned $40 a pop, and the undertaking was so vast that Jaynes could still pull in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead, McGuire said. "When you're marketing to the world, there are enough idiots out there" who will be suckered in, McGuire said in an interview.'"

Comments

There's one spammer born every second, too

[fembots]

So with this kind of high-profile "financial report", are we going to see more spammers? Seriously speaking, my spam count hasn't dropped a bit since the elimination of these 10 million spams a day. It's like that terrorism saying: If you killed Bin Laden, two more will come out to replace him.

This Jeremy is reportedly earning $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead.

Imagine if you can work 1 year without getting caught, and wisely transfered your incomes to safe place, you are basically earning $1 million a year by sitting in the prison doing some workouts, or even get a law degree specialised in anti-spam. And you wonder why there are more spams everyday?

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[spuzzzzzzz]

The significance of this case is that it applies a fairly harsh penalty for spamming. Of course it won't eliminate spam, but it will probably (hopefully) make spammers more aware of the consequences.

Imagine if you can work 1 year without getting caught

Imagine if you could work your whole life without getting caught. Because that was the situation before this verdict. Of course there are still strong financial incentives to spam, but with verdicts like this one, the incentives become weaker.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Zathras26]

It doesn't apply a "fairly harsh penalty for spamming"; it applies a fairly harsh penalty for fraud. Had he been selling a legitimate product, his prison sentence would have been much shorter if he even received one at all.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Darth McBride]

I think I have some offers for law degree's in my inbox. So he has 8 years, 11 months, 30 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds left to plan out.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[gorbachev]

"The significance of this case is that it applies a fairly harsh penalty for spamming."

It was mainly due to the fact that the scum was peddling fraudulent "products". He conned a shitload of people with his MMF schemes and other frauds.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[JimBean]

I don't know if I would want to go to a state prision for nine years (maybe less) for a couple of million dollars. I mean, think of all the unsolicited advances one is bound to receive in the shower or other areas from guys doing multiple life sentences for murder. If it were a federal crime, however, life in prison would probably be a bit easier (from what I've heard, federal prisons are better run). I guess everyone has a different threshold of pain.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[lukewarmfusion]

You're so right it's scary. I'm reading this thinking, if I were given a million dollars a year maybe I wouldn't hate spam so much.

People go to jail for much less money... and since there are loopholes to be found and exploited, spamming is an attractive business.

Corporations contract out for spyware programs. Political groups contract out for viruses. If the money is there, it will be a temptation. You can't end if forever, but you can make it harder to do and much riskier.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[DJ Kveldulv]

Ive seen a slight drop in spam over the last 6 months. Making it illegal for merchants/affiliate programs to knowingly accept spammer's traffic would cut it down even more IMO. The Can-Spam regulations have meant few Porn Affiliate programs will take any and all spam traffic they can get. Most now require CanSpam compliance.... still, hardcore spammers are still going to spam hard, laws or no laws.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[antifoidulus]

Well, from my personal observation, while there has been no decrease in spam, I have been noticing a diversification in the scams they are selling. Spammers are moving away from mortgages, get rich quick schemes, and pills(though they still are invested heavily in that area) to areas previously dominated by real life grifters-fake merchandise(esp. Rolex watches), "free" tvs, ipods, etc, and it also seems prostitution.
Sorry thing is, the same people will probably fall for these as fell for this guy's scam.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[spuzzzzzzz]

True, but fraud is how he (and most spammers) made money. The precedent is about tracking and prosecuting spammers for fraud. Had he been selling a legitimate product, he wouldn't be quite so rich.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Anonymous Coward]

> "...earning $1 million a year by sitting in the prison doing some workouts..."

Don't you mean Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prision? I wouldn't want to do that kind of "workouts"! :-)

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[MrDickey]

The problem is in part that it is such a lucrative market. What we need to do is send a message to all the idiots actually reading this crap out there and tell them not to respond. What would the war on drugs be if we didn't tell people not to use them?

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Zathras26]

I know that, but that wasn't my point. My point was that the sentence he received wasn't for spamming per se; it was for fraud that just happened to be committed thru spam. Not the same thing.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't work for drug dealers, won't work for spammers. The lure of making big bucks outweighs the threat of jail. and spammers are much harder to catch and prosecute.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[PKPerson]

Whats more unnerving than the fact that he has made money from spamming is that he can make money from this. After so much publicity about spam and scams related to it, i'm suprised that any company is willing to dish out this amount of money to advertise on Jeremy's spam list, or that any user is vunerable to this type of davertisement.
We see so many mail filters, but this story shows how many people are still exposed to spam.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[spuzzzzzzz]

Yes, but I think that the point of my original post still stands. Just 's/spamming/fraudsters who spam/'.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[ottothecow]

thats probobly because the people ending up in federal prisons tend to be scrawny nerds taking part in interstate fraud and the ilk while any large man named bubba who tries to rob a gas station ends up in state prison

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[TheOtherChimeraTwin]

With apologies to Arlo Guthrie:

And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W's where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly 'n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay $50 and delete the email." He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?" And I said, "Spamming." And they all moved away from me on the bench there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I said, "And creating a nuisance." And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench. And everything was fine, we was smoking cigarettes and all kinds of things.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[letxa2000]

My spam count peaked in April with 17,764 spams that month. In July it dropped to around 14,000 where it has been ever since.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[pentae]

The virginia laws are not going to mean less spammers.

It will simply mean less spammers operating from US soil and more spammers profiting off US citizens from other countries.

Even if a kid in Romania can make $1000 a month from spam he will live like a king. You will never, ever get rid of spam.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[MMaestro]

Had he been selling a legitimate product, his prison sentence would have been much shorter if he even received one at all.

Define 'legitimate product' when you're talking about the internet and the only creditability a website has is a fancy looking layout and a few lines of text. I could say, 'this home has an excellent view of the coast, nearby a major city, and is a stone's throw from the Atlantic Ocean' and have it turn out to be an old, leaky, abandoned deep-sea fishing ship anchored just outside of New York Harbor. Call the feds on me and I close my e-mail account maybe change ISPs if I'm paranoid and just become another nobody the police won't bother with.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Anonymous Coward]

The real worry, IMO is phishing.

My dad, the other day got a mail from earthlink, or so he thought, and was actually smart enough to call me. I asked him to forward it to me, and lo and behold, its a link to some computer in china (undoubtedly a r00ted box) with a conveniant form so that you can "update" your account information before you get kicked off the net, as the letter threatened, and I forwarded the mail to earthlink's abuse box.

Now, my dad ain't the brightest bulb on the christmas tree, and he did the right thing, but I could easily see elderly or even stupider folks falling for this. It looked authentic enough, and the address even came from earthlink.com (not net--which is a clue), and golly gee they copied earthlink's form to the tee (except that they also requested a SSN...ouch.)

And all they have to do is mine the net and send form emails that appear to be from comcast, or aol, or whomever the target seems to be connected with.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[spectre_240sx]

There's always that degree of "I won't get caught" though. People don't really rob banks anymore because they know that they're going to get caught, no matter what. Security is just too tight. The people who deal drugs, and that spam, however, know that the ratio of people who do the deeds and get punished for them are in their favor, therefore they don't think there's much chance of them getting caught and they decide that the risk is acceptable. That's my view on the whole thing anyway.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't rob banks anymore? What planet do YOU live on?

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, I think it will be many decades before our congresscritters realize they should be penalizing the spamhaus' clients.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[mikael_j]

Well, on planet Sweden I haven't heard of a lot of bank robberies lately, and the few I have heard of have all failed because they were commited by idiots looking for easy money or to fund their aryan war against whoever they thought was out to get them on that particular week. The well-planned large-scale bank robberies of yesteryear are all but gone since there are easier ways to make make money..

/Mikael

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Alioth]

Then again - have you seen a spam recently that wasn't fraudulent in some way? All the recent spam I've seen have been for pirated copies of software and counterfeit watches. Much of it relayed through pwned zombie systems. There's plenty of crimes being committed by these spammers before even considering anti-spam laws.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[mwvdlee]

Won't the boy have to bay back the money he earned (ignoring bandwidth costs ofcourse, you don't detract the cost of guns for a bankrobber either)???

Seems like he'll effectively be earing $0 a year in prison, missing out 9 years of earning money or building a career. Do prisoners have e-mail accounts? I'm sure he'll make good friends with them if they do :)

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Zathras26]

Then again - have you seen a spam recently that wasn't fraudulent in some way?

I do see non-fraudulent spam on very rare occasions. I doubt if it's even as much as one out of every thousand spams that I receive, but it does happen.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[MindStalker]

Actually this person was selling their own fraudulant product. So there was no client.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Mysticalfruit]

No, it just means the incentive to spam in the states goes down.

I apologize to the people of China, Mexico, Korea, Russia and about a half dozen other baltic and asiatic nations. Your mail doesn't make it past my MTA...

I've come to this point in my use of the internet where if I'm going to accept mail from you I'm either going to talk to you on the phone or know you in person and I've added you to my white list. All other mail gets dumped.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Anonymous Coward]

Making it illegal for merchants/affiliate programs to knowingly accept spammer's traffic would cut it down even more IMO.

I don't think so, as you'd have to prove that they knowingly accepted it. Any affiliate scheme is open to spammer participants, and they all include anti-spam agreements for the affiliates to agree to. The trouble is, they can let a million spammers sign up, and when they get caught, all they have to do is go "sorry, we asked people not to spam, we won't pay them" - so they get the hits and don't have to pay - it's a win/win situation.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Syntax Heir]

That's awesome! Haven't heard that in some time. Forgive the unnecessary comment but this variation is just too cool.

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Anonymous Coward]

So now we're not just outsourcing IT jobs, we're outsourcing our criminals too?

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Sj0]

Who in the holy hell did you give your e-mail address to?!

I've got a whole DOMAIN, and I don't get that many e-mails in a YEAR!

Re:There's one spammer born every second, too

[Sj0]

Actually, they send people worth more than $1 Millon to the "martha stewart university campus with yaht club" prison. They reserve the "pound me in the ass" prisons for teenagers who smoke pot and download music off of kazaa.

Human beings are dumb

[YetAnotherName]

"When you're marketing to the world, there are enough idiots out there."

And PT Barnum's top competitor said, "There's a sucker born every minute."

I've pretty much lost hope for the species.

Re:Human beings are dumb

[Bin_jammin]

And PT Barnum's top competitor said, "There's a sucker born every minute." no, he didn't http://www.historybuff.com/library/refbarnum.html/

Re:Human beings are dumb

[longbot]

It took you this long?

Re:Human beings are dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir, are an idiot. The first paragraph of your link backs up what he posted.

Re:Human beings are dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, I thought this was "Insightful". I guess the mods do not like being called dumb for some reason. Now they can go back to their clicky-clicky thing and just ignore the fact that they are dumb.

Re:Human beings are dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is the reason why democracy will always be a poor system of government.

Re:Human beings are dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Insight generally requires the thought to be non-obvious.
Now _you_ can go back to your trying to feel superior.

Re:Human beings are dumb

[kmmatthews]

parent says:

And PT Barnum's top competitor said, "There's a sucker born every minute." I've pretty much lost hope for the species.

followed by (.sig):

Free flat screen? [seankelly.biz]

bwhahahahahaha :)

Re:Human beings are dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.historybuff.com/library/refbarnum.html

Re:Human beings are dumb

[nacturation]

And PT Barnum's top competitor said, "There's a sucker born every minute."

I've pretty much lost hope for the species.

Is that why in your sig you're promoting a "free flat screen" to those suckers? Or were you trying to maximize the irony of the whole situation?

Re:Human beings are dumb

[Bin_jammin]

Wow, I was all set to prove myself right, and in re-reading his post, I proved myself wrong... wow, I join the ranks of the helmut patrol.

Re:Human beings are dumb

[labratuk]

The funniest thing is if you follow that link, you'll see that he's trying to get suckers to sign up under his referral by telling them that 'it really works' and that he's already received an iPod and a flatscreen. Nice try buddy.

Re:Human beings are dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because someone points out that _you_ are dumb, does not mean that they are "trying to feel superior". Idiot.

Re:Human beings are dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing that is *obvious*, is your opinion about humans.

Re:Human beings are dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

How does it work? Like with the free iPod, you sign up for a trial offer for a product or service. Then you get eight other people to do the same thing. Once you get all eight, you get a free flat screen. By clicking my referral link, I get credit for a referral. And I'll give the first six people to complete an offer through my referral link a Gmail invitation as a way of saying "thanks." Sounds like a scam, doesn't it? It is a pyramid scheme, but it's not a scam. The fact I've got a free iPod helps prove that, as do articles like this one and this one. But if you do complete an offer through my referral link, there are some precautions you should take: * Use a spam-proof email address. The address you provide will get spammed thoroughly. Hmm, sounds like a solid deal!

Who's counting?

[dauthur]

I've actually gotten more spam since this winner was arrest. And anyways, he didn't do too bad money-wise, $750k a month is better than I think 99.9% of this entire world's population. And to think... only 9 years in jail. I'd do it too. Get out of jail at age 29, still young enough to marry, have kids... and I'd be able to drive a Porsche. Or 3.

Re:Who's counting?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

$750k a month is better than I think 99.9% of this entire world's population. And to think... only 9 years in jail.

You're the second person in this thread who expresses this point of view. Interesting (and sad) society we live in were it's deemed an acceptable option to serve time in jail as a paid job...

Personally, I'd rather starve in the street than go one minute in jail. I couldn't bear the shame...

Re:Who's counting?

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

And to think... only 9 years in jail. I'd do it too. Get out of jail at age 29, still young enough to marry, have kids

... and just think how handy all that ass raping experience will be on your honeymoon.

Re:Who's counting?

[G-funk]

Personally, I'd rather starve in the street than go one minute in jail. I couldn't bear the shame

Spoken like somebody who's never starved on the street.

Re:Who's counting?

[sparkhead]

Personally, I'd rather starve in the street than go one minute in jail. I couldn't bear the shame...

What shame? The shame of being wealthy for the remainder of your life without having to work again? While any prison isn't a cakewalk, he's not going to Rikers.

The jail time isn't the issue for him, as he'll only serve about 3 years anyway even if he gets 9. What he has to be concerned about is financial lawsuits. The state should be able to fine him huge amounts for what he's done, to the point of driving him to bankruptcy. Unfortunately in many states they're not allowed to take away your primary residence, so he can still be worth quite a bit. And he most likely has money stashed away somewhere.

Crime does in fact, pay. Even sometimes when you get caught.

Re:Who's counting?

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like you never starved before on the street, rethink what you just said. Shame is better then dieing in a cold lonely alley hungry. Do you believe going to jail is shameful? Or is the the system broken? 65% of all inmates are drug related, not even violent, so you think they deserve to be in there cause the government wants you to do their drugs?

Re:Who's counting?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

What shame? The shame of being wealthy for the remainder of your life without having to work again?

You illustrate my point very well, thank you.

Re:Who's counting?

[superpulpsicle]

Ok 3 years in jail is still quite a long time. That is unless you share to same billion-dollar-corporate jail like those Enron guys. In that case you'd be punished with golf courses and lobsters for breakfast every day.

Re:Who's counting?

[mankey wanker]

Our nation's leader is a criminal: he was awol from the national guard, was a drug abuser and alcoholic, and is currently engaging in all manner of political corruption and corporate malfeasance. It breeds disrespect for the law at all levels of society. Everyone recognizes a thug when they see one.

I'd like to tell you being a wealthy thug makes Bush less attractive to people, but the truth is that people are attracted to power for all kinds of sadly genetic reasons. I know staunchly liberal women that have suggested to me that they think it might be fun to "party" with the prez. That freaks me out quite a bit - but I do understand the genetic attraction to power even so.

Bill Gates stole most of Windows functionality from others. Stole it outright, or reversed it. He's a slightly slippery case because some of the things he pilfered were not well protected in law when he actually stole them - but that doesn't change the ethical considerations at all. Most people would have behaved differently - in fact, the relative peace we enjoy in our society is predicated on the fact that most people behave differently. But anyway, Gate's is filthy rich and was recently knighted for his "service" to the queen. The downside please...?

You don't have to be a genius to realize that might makes right in our world. Might is usually some reflection of money. And to many, might is wildly attractive.

While ghetto kids ride beemers thanks to drug money, and while riding beemers equals getting the bitches, and while nailing bitches remains a favorite activity for the young and hormone-crazed - laws don't mean dick, and money/power means everything.

Spammers are just the geek version of the same equation.

Re:Who's counting?

[jcr]

Unfortunately in many states they're not allowed to take away your primary residence, so he can still be worth quite a bit.

That shelter provision only applies to civil bankruptcy. If we're talking about restitution for criminal activty, they can just about take the shirt off his back.

-jcr

Re:Who's counting?

[Billly Gates]

Hey there is also great shame of being poor and starving.

Especially if you have a wife and kids to feed.

How many ex-IT workers reading this agree? I feel shame going back to school at 27 and moving in with mom and dad again to pay the bills after companies decided not to hire Americans anymore for computer work.

Sure going to jail is bad but so is being abused by the consequences of capitalism.

I would never spam of course but if I had a kid and if my relationship with my gf became serious enough where she wanted to marry me then hell, I would!

Re:Who's counting?

[corbettw]

Our nation's leader is a criminal: he was awol from the national guard

You really need to stop watching CBS.

Here's a clue for those not in the know: in the Reserves and National Guard, you are required to attend a certain number of drills per year. There was no year in which Bush did not meet his required minimum. Anyone who insists Bush was at any time AWOL either doesn't understand how the Guard works, or just wants to find something, somewhere, to slam him with, regardless of the truth.

Re:Who's counting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, enlighten us to on what your point is.

Re:Who's counting?

[proverbialcow]

... and just think how handy all that ass raping experience will be on your honeymoon.

If you ass-rape your bride on your wedding night, what's your marriage going to be like? Luckily, I have a few URLs for $25 divorces if you need them. :)

Re:Who's counting?

[Anonymous Coward]

State Time is half time ( if your a good boy )
so 4-1/2 years for $24 million,
5333,333.33 a year
14611.87 a day
608.83 an hour, every hour
that will show him

Re:Who's counting?

[Pxtl]

That raises the question: even after the sentencing - how much money does he get to keep? Ultimately, might it have been worth 9 years in Club Fed?

Re:Who's counting?

[beitzell]

Money acquired during the commiting of a crime is foreit. Not sure if that is state level for federal level thing but if he was found guilty he gets nada.

Re:Who's counting?

[Anonymous Coward]

3 years in prison! Sounds great. I can finally study enough to finish my degree. Gives me a great excuse not to go! ;p

Re:Who's counting?

[the-build-chicken]

doesn't america have the concept of "proceeds of crime". i.e. You don't get to keep money earned from committing a criminal act that you are convicted of?

Re:Who's counting?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather starve in the street than go one minute in jail. I couldn't bear the shame...

It's not a matter of shame.

First of all, you're exaggerating and people are being distracted. It's not about going to prison or starving in the street. People who are looking at starving in the street don't have the opportunity to spam on this level. You need a huge initial investment to do this.

But it's not about shame, or about punishment. It's about making sacrifices so that we can survive as a society. Fraud is not illegal because it carries a prison sentence, it's illegal because it's harmful to society. If fear of punishment is your only deterrant, you are lacking as a person.

Ok, maybe it is about shame, but not shame for the punishment, shame for the act. The law metes out penalties based on arbitrary human rules, not some perfect morality. You can go to prison for things that are morally just. You can do things that are morally wrong and remain innocent in the eyes of the law. (because the laws are shared by many people, and it's hard to come to a concensus about morality) So the penalty says nothing about how shameful the act was.

Spending 9 years in jail, that's not shameful. Harrassing a vast number of people and harming others for your own benefit, that is shameful.

Re:Who's counting?

[cheekyboy]

But you have to admit he is part of the 'elite club' of dudes controlling the planet so he had it made since he was a kid. Not like the guy ever had a 'real job interview', he was thrown oppertunities anyone of us would have loved like jesus.

Re:Who's counting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like somebody who's never starved on the street.

Spoken like somebody who's never been assraped.

Re:Who's counting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Our nation's leader is a criminal: he was awol from the national guard, was a drug abuser and alcoholic, and is currently engaging in all manner of political corruption and corporate malfeasance. It breeds disrespect for the law at all levels of society. Everyone recognizes a thug when they see one.

I'd like to tell you being a wealthy thug makes Bush less attractive to people, but the truth is that people are attracted to power for all kinds of sadly genetic reasons. I know staunchly liberal women that have suggested to me that they think it might be fun to "party" with the prez. That freaks me out quite a bit - but I do understand the genetic attraction to power even so.

Bill Gates stole most of Windows functionality from others. Stole it outright, or reversed it. He's a slightly slippery case because some of the things he pilfered were not well protected in law when he actually stole them - but that doesn't change the ethical considerations at all. Most people would have behaved differently - in fact, the relative peace we enjoy in our society is predicated on the fact that most people behave differently. But anyway, Gate's is filthy rich and was recently knighted for his "service" to the queen. The downside please...?

You don't have to be a genius to realize that might makes right in our world. Might is usually some reflection of money. And to many, might is wildly attractive.

While ghetto kids ride beemers thanks to drug money, and while riding beemers equals getting the bitches, and while nailing bitches remains a favorite activity for the young and hormone-crazed - laws don't mean dick, and money/power means everything.

Spammers are just the geek version of the same equation.

Troll my ass!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Look, just because you (whoever you are, you CENSORer) disagree doesn't make it a troll. I read the above and thought "right on".

May I'm wrong too, but stop censoring just cause you disagree.

By the way, I have been an "anonymous coward" since sometime in the 1990's (I forget exactly when) and have NEVER registered. And never will. My choice. My freedom. My anonimity.

Re:Who's counting?

[Dever]

Can i slam him for going the 'rich son of a government man' route and puttering around in the guard?

or perhaps i can blame him for trying to pass his guard days off as some military service that gives him credibility. the flight suit 'mission accomplished' fiasco? that was ridiculous...

i can slam him for being disingenuous as hell is what i can do.

Re:Who's counting?

[G-funk]

Yeah, well if it's eating out of garbage cans or selling dope, I'll be a dope selling 3 meals a day eating kinda guy. If you stand to lose your roof or your full stomach, the threat of a few months in prison isn't really a deterrent.

Re:Who's counting?

[corbettw]

or perhaps i can blame him for trying to pass his guard days off as some military service that gives him credibility.

Yeah, 'cause no one in the Guard ever faces the possibilities of being called to go to war.

the flight suit 'mission accomplished' fiasco?

Anyone who lands aboard an aircraft carrier is required by Navy regulations to wear a flight suit. They contain important pieces of equipment, such as locators, in case you have to ditch. So it's not a fiasco to wear a flight suit when landing on an aircraft carrier, it's the law.

i can slam him for being disingenuous as hell is what i can do.

Hello Mr. Pot, have you met Mr. Kettle?

You've got mail!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

who just got a 9-year jail term recommendation from the state jury

9 years in the slammer getting unsolicited gifts from Bubba? Wow! I bet at least one of the jurors purchased a penis enlarger and, let's say, wasn't totally satisfied with the results...

Re:You've got mail!

[dauthur]

I bet at least one of the jurors purchased a penis enlarger and, let's say, wasn't totally satisfied with the results...

Yeah, my free Ipod hasn't arrived in the mail, either... I'm pretty upset about that.

Re:You've got mail!

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet at least one of the jurors purchased a penis enlarger and, let's say, wasn't totally satisfied with the results...

While Jeremy would be fortunate to be bunked with a bubba who had less than spectacular results from an enlarger let us hope and pray that he is instead bunked with a bubba who had such an unprecedented success from a combination of pills, cremes, pumps that he is now referred to as Donkey Man.

Re:You've got mail!

[jacksonj04]

I'm referred to as that anyway... ;)

Enough boasting. I think that all spammers should be deliberately placed with gay men who have had rare successes with penis enlarging kit, are in need of a mortgage, want to lose weight and inexplicably find classic literature an intriguing message subject. Oh, and have been made horny from all those damn pr0n emails.

With a punishment like *that*, who's gonna offend?

Re:You've got mail!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, Slashdot, the site that automatically mods rape jokes +5 funny.

Re:You've got mail!

[killjoe]

If he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars per month it was all worth it. He probably made at least a few million dollars and he will probably be paroled in a couple of years. A few years in jail in exchange for a few million? I'd take that.

Re:You've got mail!

[nacturation]

Rather than the chipper AOL greeting, he'll be hearing in a deep, growling voice:

You've got MALE!

Re:You've got mail!

[Anonymous Coward]

yah, and hopefully many of his fellow inmates will have bought viagra and penis enlarger from his spams. Wouldn't that be deliciously ironic?

Re:You've got mail!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, crime does pay. Get caught selling coke? Use your drug profits to hire a lawyer.

Re:You've got mail!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, not all rape jokes--just the prison rape ones.

Because it's fun to see people who deserve the worst to get it in the end. Pun intended by the way. It's the same reason that revenge flicks are so popular, I think. Wooohoo! It's a lynchin!

Re:You've got mail!

[Danny Rathjens]

I find a -2 penalty for funny moderations and reading only 3+ comments works great. 8^)

Re:You've got mail!

[ceeam]

These prison jokes are about as funny as _YOUR_ balls getting cut off when you walk out in the dark. Crimes - heavy crimes - even in prison are not funny and definitely not ok, whatever state wants you to believe to keep you scared.

Re:You've got mail!

[ceeam]

Well, speak for yourself ;). Me - I read slashdot mostly for funnies, but the problem is that "prison rape", "soviet russia", etc are about as funny as stepping in the dogshit.

Re:You've got mail!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dog shit...HaHaHaHa. Now that's funny.

Re:You've got mail!

[MikeDX]

I bet at least one of the jurors purchased a penis enlarger and, let's say, wasn't totally satisfied with the results...

I bet at least one of the inmates purchased a penis enlarger. If he wasn't pleased with the results.. you will be!

Re:You've got mail!

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't find it funny when someone ELSE steps in dog shit?

Re:You've got mail!

[d34thm0nk3y]

Aaah...what thick....black.....text you used to make that joke...

FYI, if you don't RTFA

[seizer]

The "McGuire" quoted here is the Attorney General, not the spammer. He's the one who states that he thinks people are idiots, not the spammer.

Mind you, the spammer will know that people are idiots :-)

Re:FYI, if you don't RTFA

[smkndrkn]

Right.

The spammer already knows this...

C.R.E.A.M

[madsenj37]

This article will just encourage people to make a living spamming with that much potential money.

Re:C.R.E.A.M

[evilmousse]

mods: +1 wu-tang

I wish ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I could pull in between $30,000 and $750,000 per month while keeping my spending below $50,000 (per month).

Re:I wish ...

[Darth_Burrito]

I wish I could pull in between $30,000 and $750,000 per month while keeping my spending below $50,000 (per month).

I think I can help you out. Send me $50,000 every month and I will send you $30,000 back.

ooh

[Naikrovek]

for those of us that are greedy, this seems like an attractive option, with the obvious exception of the jail term.

whatever you do, always make sure you make spamming attractive to those of us who are short on money. cripes.

Re:ooh

[hawley Griffin]

are you joking? first you spam the living day lights out of people, become a millionaire, then *if* you get caught and sent to jail, you will get free food, housing and quality sex. sounds like a sweet deal to me

AOL addresses

[6Yankee]

Prosecutors don't know how he got the lists, though McGuire said the AOL names matched a list of 92 million addresses an AOL software engineer has been charged with stealing. However Jaynes got them, they were particularly valuable because AOL customers and eBay users by their very nature have already shown a willingness to engage in e-commerce.

Or particularly valuable because AOL users are, well, AOL users?

Re:AOL addresses

[arminw]

...AOL users are, well, AOL users?...

Actually, I like AOL because the amount of SPAM I get in my AOL e-mail accounts has been dropping dramatically lately, but increasing in other ISP accounts. Their combined legal/technical SPAM fighting effort must be bearing some fruit.

Re:AOL addresses

[LordoftheWoods]

Other ISPs getting less? I think not. I get zero. ZERO spam per day. Who could 'like' an ISP which 'accidently' leaks your email and the rest of their customers' to spammers? Besides, not only is AOL hella slow, they also don't feel the need to follow standards. I have _never_ heard a truly positive testimonial about AOL outside their own advertisments. (No, 'we get less spam now' doesn't count) I have never used the service myself. However with two friends getting barely dialup speeds, another having had to reinstall windows to eliminate their crappy browser software (whats with that? it just uses IE to display the page anyway), and another who has AOL broadband but can't use it with Linux because they use some nonstandard PPPoE _crap_, its not one of my priorities. AOL is the Microsoft of of ISPs.

Re:AOL addresses

[dhoonlee]

I can confirm this. In a conversation with my spammer friend, he mentioned that AOL e-mail addresses are by far the most profitable.

Re:AOL addresses

[lachlan76]

I like AOL because I can save a copy of all my email, and then grep for it in my spam filter.

Haven't got a spam since ;)

Some additional details...

[grnchile]

Some additional details, including a charming picture, are available in his hometown paper:

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1828341p-81 41513c.html

Yes - they were T1 lines.

Re:Some additional details...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he used to beat me up in highschool :(

Re:Some additional details...

[AndroidCat]

He could definitely use a makeover. Either in Photoshop or Bubba Eye for the Spammer Guy.

Re:Some additional details...

[Zocalo]

There's a *much* better picture on CNN's article - not so much a smart black suit as a natty orange one. Better get used to those threads Bubba, or is that your new best friend's name? I forget... :)

Re:Some additional details...

[vkrivokuca]

Huh... Quentin Tarantino is convicted junk e-mailer?

Re:Some additional details...

[Cramer]

Not all of them were T1's. I know for a fact he had at least 2 DS3's. (because I saw the router they went into.) The ironic thing is, spammers always pay the bills on time.

Re:Some additional details...

[haggar]

Nah, he's just wearing the "Kill Bill" promotional shirt.

Re:Some additional details...

[Jumper99]

Oh crap! It's that Belushi guy....no, not the dead one.....

How does this work?

[mOoZik]

When someone actually pays for the products or services, do they not receive them or are the products received not as described?

Re:How does this work?

[YrWrstNtmr]

When someone actually pays for the products or services, do they not receive them or are the products received not as described?

The work-at-home 'offers' are merely "Here is a list of companies. Write to them and see if they'll hire you to work at home"

or stuffing envelopes. What you really end up doing is stuffing envelopes with "Here is how to make money stuffing envelopes. Please send $19.95"

Technically, what you've gotten is what you ordered. But what you ordered was not-quite-legal.

Re:How does this work?

[mOoZik]

But what about the other stuff? You know, hair products, reproductory organ amelioration ointments, and things of that sort. When there's an actual product that is "advertised," is the order actually filled?

Re:How does this work?

[YrWrstNtmr]

Probably (more or less). If you order 'Penis Enlargement Cream" for $24.95, and get a tube of anonymous goo worth about $0.07, would you say that the order has been filled?

The other problem lies in getting a refund once you've figured out that you've been ripped off.
Mr. Jeremy Spammer isn't a wholesaler, but merely a cashier. He has no inventory. You send your money to him, he takes his cut and moves the order on the the actual seller. They send you the 'stuff'. You want your money back, but the only contact is who you sent the money to, Mr. Jeremy Spammer. He has since moved onto a different business name and contact info. You have little chance of getting a refund.

J. Spammer has his cut, the wholesaler has their cut, and you have a tube of goo.

Re:How does this work?

[arose]

If you order 'Penis Enlargement Cream" for $24.95, and get a tube of anonymous goo worth about $0.07, would you say that the order has been filled?

If it's "goo" from anonymous cowards...

Re:How does this work?

[wirelessbuzzers]

The work-at-home 'offers' are merely "Here is a list of companies. Write to them and see if they'll hire you to work at home"

Apparently, some of them are also basically money laundering for the Russian mob. They aren't terrible as work-at-home jobs go, but highly illegal.

Re:How does this work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just buy somne GOLD using cash, and then exchange the gold for some new cash elsewhere. Even if you make a 4% loss, if you time the buy/sell dates you could even come up on top since the average POG is rising (in US$ terms)

Peoply who respond to spam...

[zerdood]

Don't deserve to keep their money. This guy should be commended for teaching the idiots of the world a valuable lesson. I'm sure he did all this in the name of public service.

Some quick math:

[sssmashy]

$40 per order

1 order per every 30,000 spam

est. $24,000,000 net worth = 600,000 orders = 18,000,000,000 spams

9 years jail time = 283,824,000 seconds

So the ratio is 63.4 spam messages per second of prison time

Re:Some quick math:

[Incadenza]

So the ratio is 63.4 spam messages per second of prison time

And with hashcash we can easily turn that around to 63.4 seconds of prison time per spam message.

Re:It makes no difference.

[JPM NICK]

What do you use to filter out all this spam? I agree that we should teach people how to filter, so if you do not mind, please share. or anyone else for that matter. and what if you have a small buisness with say 15 people, but no exchnage box, just a small stand alone mail server. what do yuo suggest then?

what about the $?

[evilmousse]

so..

will he still be a millionaire when he gets out of jail?

is he serving his sentence in min-sec alongside martha stewart?

maybe i should re-think my long-term investments, I could do 9 min-sec years for a few mil.

Re:what about the $?

[Anonymous Coward]

Put the money into an off-shore account, why not?

Re:what about the $?

[phreakmonkey]

maybe i should re-think my long-term investments, I could do 9 min-sec years for a few mil.

From Office Space:
You know, minimum security prison is no picnic. I had a client in there once. He said the trick is: kick someone's ass the first day, or become somebody's bitch. Then everything will be alright.

Or worse, you could get sentanced to one of those "Federal Pound-me-in-the-ass Prisons."

Re:what about the $?

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is a world left after russia nukes most of the cities in USA to get rid of the corporates (but leave the country folk behind) read johntitor.com

Depends

[Sycraft-fu]

If enough of them start going to jail, it'll probably help. Also as spam filters get better, profits will go down. The spam system we used to have was maybe 50% efficient, meaning about half the spam it recieved, it failed to filter. The new one (Barracuda) is probably 90-95% efficient. Means where a spammer had to send an average of 2 messages before to get through, now they have to send 10-20. It also shuts down on them much quicker so they can't hit the whole domain as easy.

Now there's been stories on /. about new spam filtering technologies in the works that are 99.9% or better (some saying 99.999%). If stuff like that hgets popular, it'll be a real bitch. Means you'd have to send between 1,000-1,000,000 e-mails on average to get through.

It's not a winnable war as in someday all spam will suddenly stop and no one will ever try again, but it's winnable in that between lawsuits, jail terms, and better filters we can make it a much less attractive bussiness.

Re:Depends

[shawb]

Means you'd have to send between 1,000-1,000,000 e-mails on average to get through.

And you know what people those messages are likely to get to? Those who don't have spam filters, and so likely those people who don't understand it, and therefore... Ding Ding Ding... those people who are most likely to become "customers."

I suppose that spam getting filtered out at the ISP, companywide, or campuswide level would probably cut out access to a fair number of marks, though.

Re:Depends

[MurphyZero]

Some rough assumptions below to show how effective filtering will be. You assume that everyone will have that type of filter. Here are my assumptions for now. Assume that 20% have no filter, could be high, could be low. Another 50% have an inefficient filter, removes 50%. Another 20% have 95% efficiency. And the last 10% has 99.99% efficiency. Rough guesses and large margin of error. With those assumptions, out of 10000 emails, 4601 get through. People using filters are probably (an assumption, but reasonable) more likely not to waste their money

This brings you to the fool and his money ratio (how many emails that get through it takes to get one to send money) Hard to say with any accuracy, but the lead-in stated 30000 emails, assuming all got through. Maybe the fool and money ratio is closer to 20000 emails. So he would have to send closer to 50000 emails to get 1 money response due to filters.

The key for stopping spammers really isn't better filters. It's getting the clueless users to use them. Out of those 4601 emails that got thru, 4500 were in the classes with no or weak filtering. Those people move to the 90% filtering rate, the total goes to 801 emails, a vast reduction. You attack the problem from the other end, those who use better filters already and use a perfect filter and the total drops down to 4500. Spam filtering in the basic user email programs may be the best way to combat spam. For those who want choices, different programs for power users. But in the end it comes down to the fool and money ratio. As long as those people have access to the internet, spammers will be able to find them and part them from their money.

Re:Depends

[JimBobJoe]

Also as spam filters get better, profits will go down.

In the same way that the more resources we put into preventing illegal drugs entering the country, the profits for drugs lords drop.

As I type this up, I'm still figuring out if that's an apt analogy. On the other hand, the economist in me rejects what you said, noting that the most important spam filter is the email receiver. Clearly if there are individuals out there who keep on buying from spam emails, then profit per person can't be declining, even if the potential customer base is shriking (which it may be in some places, but I suspect its' growing in others.) Fortunately, there are no spam buying addictions out there (except for those whoh really get suckered into the nigerian scams.)

Re:Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

People using filters are probably (an assumption, but reasonable) more likely not to waste their money

Exactly. If you are actively filtering out spam, you are not ay all likely to buy something from spam.

So, why do spammers try to get around filters? Why place random words at the bottom of emails in an effort to 'poison' baysian filters?

Re:Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

But aren't the filterless clients expunged by the virus-du-jour?

Wow. Finally a viable reason to promote virus writers? HELP THE WAR ON SPAM! Then again, maybe not...

Re:Depends

[dodobh]

And those 20 messages cost you in terms of server resources, sysadmin time, bandwidth. If it goes to 1000, even more of your resources are being consumed.

Stop spam at the source. Use DNSBLs instead, or even local access lists. Much cheaper and far more efficient.

Re:Depends

[MindStalker]

They generally specifically target ISP level filters, especially the one on AOL.

Re:Depends

[doublem]

Spam filters will only be used by people who don't want SPAM.

The problem is, there are plenty of people (I've worked with the idiots) who see SPAM the same way they see ads on TV. I've gotten patient, long suffering looks form people when I tried to explain that the SPAM was NOT being sent by the ISP to offset the costs of operation. SPAM does NOT make your Internet connection cheaper, and the offers are not legitimate, but I know people who buy stuff from Spam and think the ISP is making enough money off sending it to reduce costs.

I had one blithering idiot say that he didn't want to think about how much more expensive his AOL account would be if it weren't for the SPAM he received.

"It's like broadcast TV, they send the e-mail to make AOL cost less."

I tried to explain that SPAM costs the ISP money, and even showed him some articles on the topic, and he still insisted I was wrong, even as he, literally, struggled to get the digital camera he'd purchased through SPAM to work.

These people will never use SPAM filters.

The people who buy things via SPAM will never take advantage of the technology to stop it.

I hat to say it, but there is a percentage of the population that will always be taken in because they are, to be cruel yet blunt, too stupid to realize they're being ripped off.

someone needs to...

[Anonymous Coward]

rewrite "Inferno." Dante should have left an especially nasty punishment for guys like this.

I'm a vegetarian,

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't had any problem with spam for years.

Re:I'm a vegetarian,

[Anonymous Coward]

But wouldn't all of these people sending you meat products against your will be offensive? ;)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:It makes no difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

And nobody thought of this before? Amazing! And so simple! Hello everybody: filter your mail and don't respond! No more spam!

9 years in jail is too light...

[Dimensio]

...but no one else seems to agree with me that convicted email spammers should be slowly tortured to death.

Re:9 years in jail is too light...

[dmaxwell]

My favorite method is an electric chair where the switch has been replaced with a dimmer dial. The dial should be clearly marked where probable fatality starts of course.

Re:9 years in jail is too light...

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn you Eighth Amendment!

Re:9 years in jail is too light...

[Anonymous Coward]

No one agrees with you because torturing spammers to death is unacceptable...

Once they are dead their suffering ends, so you should torture them but keep them alive.

Re:9 years in jail is too light...

[Angelofintegrity]

Good people don't need laws to perform good deeds, greedy people always find ways around well-intented laws. Paternalistic government doesn't seem to work well. Ever been pulled over for not wearing a seatbest??

Re:9 years in jail is too light...

[Joel from Sydney]

I think getting nailed to a wall for nine years by the testicles would suffice.

Re:9 years in jail is too light...

[KomaToast]

There is no punishment too hideous for spammers.
I hope they're treated in prison the same as child molesters.

Re:9 years in jail is too light...

[stor]

The dial should be clearly marked where probable fatality starts of course.

Why? Isn't it more fun to try to guess that by the expression on their face?

OK that's rough. I'm actually against capital punishment. Executing people is bad, m'kay? which leads me on to a couple of documentary recommendations:

1. The World At War
I've recommended this one before. It's a detailed and appropriately somber BBC doco on WWII. Do you know about the anti-Hitler conspirators that were caught and executed by hanging on meat-hooks? I find that painful to even think about.

2. Executions
This one's pretty damn nasty so be warned: It's not for the fainthearted. I don't like watching people get killed but I felt compelled to watch this. One scene of a guy getting executed by AK-47 is awful. Not a _great_ doco but may help some people reconsider their position on capital punishment.

That said, a "Running Man"-type scenario with geeks as "Stalkers" could be well-received. ;)

Cheers
Stor

Re:9 years in jail is too light...

[spiff42]

Haha...

"We'll give you 9 years... in the electric chair... and then we will hang you..."

/spiff

Re:9 years in jail is too light...

[Snowdog668]

Running Man, the short story or the horrid movie that they made of it?

parasites

[Doc Ruby]

Karl Rove, Bush's political controller, made his career in junk mail ("Direct Marketing"). He has had similar success, with better performance, fueled by a similar attitude towards his market: American voters. Think his "boss" will run a Justice Department intolerant of spammers like Jaynes? Or recruit from their ranks to move from victory to victory, at our expense?

Re:parasites

[jcr]

Rove didn't send his junk mail with postage due.

-jcr

Re:parasites

[Doc Ruby]

Yet another reason that old veteran faces competition from the young turks living the dream on the Internet. Although some would say the $10T debt that Rove has masterminded is the priciest stamp ever.

Re:parasites

[AKnightCowboy]

Think his "boss" will run a Justice Department intolerant of spammers like Jaynes?

OK, I'm scratching my head on this one. Bush is President. A spammer just got 9 years in prison for spamming. So I guess the answer is yes?

Re:parasites

[Doc Ruby]

Guess again: a spammer got 9 years. Any less spam in your mailbox? Until there's a real risk of incarceration or other proportional remedies to spammer damage, that measurably inhibit spammers, the Justice Department's policy will fall more in the "tolerant" range than "intolerant".

Re:parasites

[jesterzog]

I don't know anything about Karl Rove, but my experience has been that the majority of direct marketing associations don't like regular spammers.

Direct marketers would like to be able to send people emails as much as everyone else, and I'm not trying to argue that this is a good thing. There are many sorts of direct marketers, however, and not all of them want to spam as many people as possible using brute force.

But their reputation is damaged by spammers who use very shady techniques to market directly to people. eg. Faking headers, distributing via viruses or infected machines, routing email through China where SMTP servers may be less secure, redirecting bounce messages to fake addresses (often innocent unsuspecting people with email accounts) essentially trying to hide the source of their emails, and selling illegal products.

Whichever way you spin it, these aren't ethical business practices, and if they're not against the law then there are a lot of legislators who would like to shut them down if it could be done cleanly.

I'm pretty sure that most direct marketers would like this person to be stopped as much as everyone else, simply because he's not doing them any favours by making people dislike direct marketing.

Re:parasites

[Doc Ruby]

Junk mail, as low as it is, at least subsidizes all the other mail with its postage. Spam, of course, flips the script. JUnk mailers would love to get away with all of that, but they can't (consequent of their own history and positioning). So of course they hate their competition which is less policed, easier, possibly more profitable, and maybe even more fun (penis enlargers, cialis, herbal ecstasy, foreign brides and Nigerian millions are a better fantasy than National Geographic subscriptions). Though there will likely remain a useful niche for postal spam, most of these junk mailers who can't beat 'em, will probably join 'em on the Internet.

Re:parasites

[jemfinch]

Think his "boss" will run a Justice Department intolerant of spammers like Jaynes?

It would be a great day indeed when our only complaint about the American Justice Department is that it didn't prosecute spammers agressively.

Jeremy

Re:parasites

[Doc Ruby]

It would be a great day when we have only one complaint about it. Is that the fallacy of the excluded middle, or are you just happy to see your lawyer?

Re:parasites

[jesterzog]

I guess my point is that direct marketing organisations that represent businesses often (not always, to be fair) do want certain amounts of rules in place.

For instance, the New Zealand direct marketing association (with which I'm most familiar) requires that all of its members follow some very strict rules, including at least having some form of opt-in system, making sure that members make it easy for people to get off their list and ensuring sure that it actually happens properly. For the record, I still don't agree that this is enough on it's own --- I'm absolutely in favour of verified opt in at minimum.

They're fully in favour of anything that lets them have some ability to use email for marketing purposes, but cracks down on anyone who seriously violates the trust. One of the big problems at the moment is that almost nobody has any trust in the majority of direct marketing material they get. (Almost all of it is quite dodgy spam, which floods out anything that might be genuine.) eg. Unless I'm absolutely sure that I know and trust the source, I'll almost never send an unsubscribe email, because most spammers are likely to ignore it, use it as a guarantee that I'm reading my email, and shunt my address onto the next spammer.

Direct marketers, meaning the genuine ones, don't like it when people don't trust them. Aside from legal issues, if people don't trust them then it means they're less likely to read the email in the first place or take any notice of them. Many direct marketing businesses have much more honest operations to protect the reputation of, and using email for anything is quite a risk if it's potentially going to make people hate them.

Re:parasites

[AKnightCowboy]

Guess again: a spammer got 9 years. Any less spam in your mailbox?

I use spamassassin so I don't really get any spam in my inbox, so honestly I couldn't tell the difference. On the other hand, spam had 8 years to grow unfettered under the last administration so it'd be kind of silly to blame this one for all the problems. If we had nipped spam in the bud like this in 1993 then spam would be much less prevalent.

Re:parasites

[Anonymous Coward]

*sniff* "My son, the spammer..." (wipes eyes)

Re:parasites

[Doc Ruby]

It's silly to whine about the past, or dive into partisan bickering about the government, instead of doing something about it. This administration is the only one we've got, and our responsibility as citizens is to criticize it, feed back until it represents our interests accurately. So I ask how the *current department* will prioritize this important crime. Let's focus on complaining about something that can change.

Re:parasites

[Sj0]

Heh, critisize, that's a good one.

Unamerican traitor. If you don't like things the way they are, get out.

America: Love it or leave it.

Think of the Trees

[10101001011]

While most will probably scoff at what I'm saying (mod me down, but read first if you don't mind), can you imagine the number of trees had this been a junk-mail business? Imagine the wasted trees that just go fluttering off on recycling day (assuming you even have one [!]). I for one don't mind a bit of SPAM (hell, it's good for a laugh) now and then since 90% of my correspondence goes through a fairly secure (twelve digit, randomly generated e-mail address).

Re:Think of the Trees

[Dimensio]

If he had been using paper junk mail, then he would have had to pay to send out his garbage, rather than stealing the resources of others.

Spammers actually have used "save the trees" as a justification in the past. They try to distract attention away from the fact that what they do is theft, period.

Re:Think of the Trees

[Anonymous Coward]

There wouldn't have been as many pieces of junk mail as the number of spam e-mail messages this guy sent.

It costs more for paper, ink, printing and mailing of all those flyers than for an equivalent number of e-mails and their related costs (buying mailing lists, bandwidth, etc.).

Re:Think of the Trees

[HeghmoH]

That is a nonsensical argument. If it were conducted via normal paper-based mail, the volume wouldn't be anywhere near as high.

Re:Think of the Trees

[fr2asbury]

I'm not scoffing, but think of the postage. Assuming that he could get by with the minimum first class postage, to send out ten million pieces of junk mail a day, would cost him over a hundred million dollars per month, in postage alone. I know the mail system is closed on Sundays, but I'm assuming that he sent spam on Sundays and no one can stop him from putting mail in the box on Sunday (except the vast number of pieces). Also he might be able to get some bulk mail discount, I don't really know how that works, but it would still be a lot. Now add to that paper, envelopes, printing and the resources to stuff and post. On his best month he made $700,000. He'd go broke in a heart beat trying to do that by regular mail.

Re:Think of the Trees

[Antique Geekmeister]

The bulk mail discounts are *huge*. The Post Office is kept afloat by junk mail: it's one of the federal offices that actually makes a profit, but it does so because bulk mail is very easy to process with all the bar code scanners and older bulk mail handling techniques. If it weren't easy and cheap, far more of your mail at home would actually be worth reading rather than the 90% that most of us simply throw away.

Re:Think of the Trees

[Sj0]

Most purists abhor the use of apostrophes in posessives. It's an archaic and incorrect usage.

Re:It makes no difference.

[zerdood]

Get Mozilla Thunderbird.
www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird

Sounds fair to me

[Sycraft-fu]

All those spammers that argue that spam is no big deal and no huge inconvinenece. We agree, so the amount of jail time for each on is trivial, fractions of a second for a spam. It just adds up :)

(Yes I know that's not how the sentence was arrived at).

Re:what about the even-more $?

[evilmousse]

hmm, maybe use my time there to write a book net a few more mil.

Re:It makes no difference.

[Jjeff1]

I suggest ASSP.
I've been using it for months for various customers in production networks. Free, written in Perl and runs on *nix or Windows. Can integrate with just about any mail server. I use it with Exchange. It also uses clamAV to do some basic virus filtering.

$700,000 in one month???

[Anonymous Coward]

Crap! I'm in the wrong line of work!

Penis enlargement

[Magickcat]

I bet he's now praying that none of his fellow inmates have purchased penis enlargement pills.

Re:Penis enlargement

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be the opposite of that? Because if they purchased the pills, then they are probably small to begin with, and he KNOWS the pills didn't work, thus it slides in less painfully.

Re:Penis enlargement

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because rape is funny.

Re:Penis enlargement

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because rape is funny.

To human beings, everything can be funny, provided it occurs to others: death, disease, war, mutilation, ...

Re:Penis enlargement

[Anonymous Coward]

Who says it's rape? Maybe he just doesn't like big penises. Stop oppressing people with your heterosexist rape archetypes.

These People Are Not Evil

[nate nice]

Like you, I hate spam. I widh it never came my way, and thanx to some filters and careful eMail use, I don't have much of a problem with it. Understandably I don't use my eMail as much as some extreme power users I have met, so I can imagine I don't expose myself as others who have greater problems than me. So, although I agree these people can be rather annoying, I do not think they should be jailed as a criminal.

Perhaps monatary fines, like 40% of their income would be fair? This money could be put into national programs to make our internet faster and modernize as many facets as possible. This would benefit all people who use the internet, for obvious reasons.

If the spammers try and lie about their income, they would of course be tried criminaly, etc for all business malpractices.

My point is, we as a society could profit form these people. Lets face the fact, at least in America, advertising always finds its way into every media medium, and the Internet is no different. For better or worse, if we live in a consumerist society, as we do, we will be exposed to advertising. How else will they let us know what we want to buy?

eMail is not a right. The Internet is not a right. Why pay to jail these people. They haven't hurt anyone, and really are running an innovative business, as far as marketing is innovative. No matter what, a spammer taken off the Net today will be replaced by another yesterday. It's a battle you cannot win. The current solution is not creative or well considered. Let's tax it and invest it in ourselves.

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[freeweed]

For better or worse, if we live in a consumerist society, as we do, we will be exposed to advertising. How else will they let us know what we want to buy?

Quite possibly, the most damning indictment of the human condition I've ever seen.

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[nate nice]

Yeah, that last line there was supposed to be put in as:
<fesicious>How else will they let us know what we want to buy? </fesicious>

But it did not post as such due to the post parameteres I have set. SO, yes clearly that looks really bad as is, but it was intended as sarcasim.

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, that's a simply smashing idea!

"Sure, go ahead. Steal from thousands of server administrators and users, commit credit card fraud, and so forth. And if you get caught, charged, prosecuted AND convincted, we'll make you give back... uh, say, a little less than half of it. But you can keep the rest, and there's no jail time, so you can do it again immediately if you want.

Awesome deterent. You sure you hate spam? Because I think it's more likely that you're a spammer yourself with this idea. Either that, or just a moron.

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully someone will mod this up so you can escape with your life... :)

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[kylegordon]

Do you perhaps mean "facetious" :-)

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[HeghmoH]

Spam is junk mail sent COD without the option to refuse payment. The fact that the incremental cost per spam is tiny doesn't matter; it's not zero, and these people send a tremendous volume of messages. The fact that the protocols are effectively designed to allow abuse doesn't matter either, because taking advantage of an inherently broken system in an illegal manner is still illegal. Last, most spammers (judging by the contents of my junk mail folder) are engaging in fraud to various degrees, such as ads for "herbal viagra" to the enormous, like advertising for cheap mortgages (I'm sure those are just phishing schemes), illegal prescription drugs, pirated software, etc.

Spam is not legitimate advertising. All you have to do to realize this is compare spam with other advertising. Normal advertising makes it very clear that it is, in fact, advertising, it clearly indicates the product being advertised, and it clearly indicates the organization doing the advertising. Spam, on the other hand, actively tries to disguise itself as personal e-mail, actively hides its source by doing things like forging e-mail headers, and often actively hides the product it is advertising by merely providing a link to a web site with no explanation of what it is. If spam really were legitimate advertising, spammers would not be doing any of this.

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

fesicious? WTF is fescicious?

Maybe: Facetious?

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[cbrocious]

"Spam is not legitimate advertising. All you have to do to realize this is compare spam with other advertising. Normal advertising makes it very clear that it is, in fact, advertising, it clearly indicates the product being advertised, and it clearly indicates the organization doing the advertising."

So is (Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Nike, $NAME_OF_LARGE_CORPORATION)'s product placement legitimate advertising? I know, personally, that I _hate_ seeing product placement on near every TV show out there, but should we make this illegal as well?

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[nate nice]

probably.

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[Leebert]

Why pay to jail these people. They haven't hurt anyone

Tell that to the folks I've charged $XYZ to implement antispam solutions.

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're sneaking into your house and scattering Coke bottles around, then yes, you'd have a case.

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[HeghmoH]

That's an interesting question. I would consider product placement to be something of a gray area. However, they are basically embedding ads in somebody else's products, which you then choose to receive of your own free will. The fact that you don't always know when there's going to be product placement makes this a little iffy. At the very least, product placement only fails one test: it's not clearly marked as advertisement. It makes no effort to hide what it's advertising or who it's advertising for.

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[the grace of R'hllor]

Bull shit.

If I'm outside your door yelling at the top of my lungs about penis enlargers, viagra, and various other crap, all day, all night, would you be so quick to say "You're not hurting anyone"?

In the worst case, you open the door and punch my teeth in, and in the best case the police would come pick me up for harassment. This is easy, for actual physical harassment, because you have to be there to commit it. Spam requires no such thing.

I get 300 mails a day, practically all spam. I also get a lot of commercial E-mail. I make the distinction between these two, as the commercial E-mail is actually targetted at me, either because I signed up with them, ordered from them once, or signed up with one of their partners and checked the "Mail me" button. I like commercial E-mail, telling me the things I can buy at local stores, or informing me of new products from quality manufacturers.

Spam is harassment, plain and simple, and it costs money, too. Think of the bandwidth alone, not to mention support costs for ISPs, etc. My own ISP had to take an SMTP server offline, because the IP got listed in SpamCop. This costs money.

So fuck spam, and fuck spammers.

Re:These People Are Not Evil

[nate nice]

You're outside my door and on my property?! This is so much different than an eMail. You own your property. You don't own the Internet. Bandwidth costs? What differentiates spam bandwidth from other misuses of bandwidth? Is there such a thing as bandwidth misuse? These spammers, if done legitimately (ie, without zombies, etc), pay for their bandwidth. It is not harassment because you are not forced to do anything. It is harassment like any other advertisement is harassment

What about all the junk mail I get unsolicited? I don't want it, causes me to maybe overlook my "good" mail, costs money to send and can often be deceiving. Spammers are annoying, some of them break laws, but someone who sends mass eMails out should not be treated like a rapist or murderer. I hate spam too, but I at least understand what cruel and unusual punishment is and what it means for a punishment to fit a crime. Go back to your self-ritious, totalitarian empire dreams.

Another one born every minute

[dkleinsc]

Jaynes might receive 10,000 to 17,000 credit card orders, thus making money on perhaps only one of every 30,000 e-mails he sent out.

We now have clinching proof that there exist at least 200,000 complete suckers in the world.

Re:Another one born every minute

[Anonymous Coward]

We now have clinching proof that there exist at least 200,000 complete suckers in the world.

A couple of weeks ago, we proved there's at least 59,000,000 complete suckers in the U.S...

Re:Another one born every minute

[relaxrelax]

"We now have clinching proof that there exist at least 200,000 complete suckers in the world."

Considering the spam in my inbox hasn't dropped by even 0.1%, I'd say there are 200,000,000 complete suckers in the net.

Compute how many complete suckers there are OFF the net, and you might end up with a number not unlike the total number of Emails this spammer sent!

god damnit

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep missing the bubbles!

Is it to late for me to change careers?

Not everyon has good filtering

[Sycraft-fu]

Some ISPs don't have any at all, and most end users aren't savvy enough to set it up themselves. Even those that do, it's not always that good. Before our current spam solution, our program was only maybe 50% accurate. It helped but not all that much. Even our new one is only 90-95% accurate, and we are haivng some problems because it filters some legit mailing lists.

As for not responding, well there are a lot of suckers out there. Not much you can do about that.

Re:It makes no difference.

[Headcase88]

Remember, though, lots of people aren't smart enough to set up good filters or even to ignore spam. (most people use IE).

my wish...for Christmas

[Mikeybo]

Is that most of the inmates had bought from his spams viagra and penis enlarger.

Re:my wish...for Christmas

[Mikeybo]

oops, didn't replied at the right place :(

Next SPAM Msg

[Nichevo]

I can just see it now the next big SPAM message to be making the rounds: You too can be making $300,000 to $750,000 a month for only a few minutes a day - just buy this simple software that makes it all happen while you sleep. Be in quick and we will throw in a free bottle of viagra.

Re:Next SPAM Msg

[jshriverWVU]

Really? hehe sign me up.... my girl and I both can enjoy a good 8hrs of vigra ;) j/k :)

They are lawbreakers, prosecute them

[antispam_ben]

I do not think they should be jailed as a criminal.

PLease read through the "Information about spam" llnks on this website, written at least eight years ago when spam was much less of a problem yet still as relevant today, and see you can still justify that statement:

http://spam.abuse.net/overview/

While that site also describes many peripheral issues involving content, the fact is, regardless of content, spam is theft of Internet services.

Lets face the fact, at least in America, advertising always finds its way into every media medium, and the Internet is no different.

That's what banner ads on websites are. People pay the website owners to put those ads on their sites. Spam is different.

Re:It makes no difference.

[nikclev]

So you're telling me that you think you could teach the same poeple that would actually buy a P3N|S P(_)MP how to properly set up a good email filter? Tell you what.. you try that, I'll start up a spamming business, we'll see who is succesfull. I'm not trying to be an ass, just trying to be realistic.

You are mistaken.

[jcr]

These people *are* evil. They steal vast quantities of money in very small increments.

My point is, we as a society could profit form these people.

Maybe by selling them for medical experimentation?

eMail is not a right. The Internet is not a right.

Email is one use of my property, which it is my right to control. Spamming is not a free-speech issue, it's a property rights issue.

They haven't hurt anyone,

Try telling any ISP that's had to clean up after them that spammers haven't hurt anyone.

Why pay to jail these people.

Because capital punishment for spamming probably can't get sufficient public support.

-jcr

Re:You are mistaken.

[jefmes]

Why pay to jail these people.

Because capital punishment for spamming probably can't get sufficient public support.

I'll vote for it! Bandwidth stealing, time-consuming bastards...

Re:You are mistaken.

[loraksus]

Because capital punishment for spamming probably can't get sufficient public support.

Ahh, capital punishment, when 9 years of anal rape bundled with HIV and Hepatitis infection isn't enough.

Call me insensitive to your plight or whatever, but cleaning up a couple emails fucking pales in comparison to what this guy will experience in prison.
People get less time for murder.
Murder.
If you can't comprehend the difference, I really don't know how to explain it to you. I doubt you could even comprehend the difference.

And please, before you start, fuck off with the "billion spams x seconds = more than one lifetime arguement". Again, you probably can't comprehend this.

Oh, he has a somewhat good chance of catching HIV and dying of AIDS, (or even getting beat to death on whim) so just to satisfy your sense of vengance, you probably got your capital punishment.

Re:You are mistaken.

[jcr]

It's not a "couple of emails", it's theft of services that has enabled him to pocket millions of dollars. Just like counterfeiting currency or insurance fraud, the fact that the impact of his crime is very diffuse doesn't reduce the scale of the crime.

Again, you probably can't comprehend this.

I understand it fully, and I doubt that you do.

-jcr

Re:You are mistaken.

[loraksus]

So it's ok to kill someone for theft.
Ok. I'll pretend I get it.

Re:You are mistaken.

[jcr]

So it's ok to kill someone for theft.

Depends on the scale of the theft.

-jcr

Re:You are mistaken.

[roman_mir]

It has been done before in different places not so far ago, last century in the country where I am originally from USSR it was a practice in the late twenties, early thirties.

To be honest with you, I would not lose a second of good night sleep if we started putting spammers to death.

Re:You are mistaken.

[Tonttoro]

Oy! If they take our horsies... Hang 'em, that's what we will!

Nukem!

[WilyCoder]

Fry the bastard! I won't miss him or his trashy spam messages.

Humanity

[payndz]

Sometimes I wonder, 'Are there really still enough people out there greedy, naive and stupid enough to fall for spammers, phishers and 419ers and make them millionaires?

Then I think, 'Oh, wait. Human beings. Guh.' And I get depressed. Because I'm one of them, which makes me just as vulnerable to some new scam that has a bit more intelligence behind it...

Re:Humanity

[blahplusplus]

Yeah well we're not all omniscient. That and you can't figure out someones intent from an email. It's just text, you're just reading what someone else wrote. Business credibility on the internet are not very visible, you never know if the guy behind "Mega corporate X's" website might be some guy living with his mom in his basement.

Re:Humanity

[cheekyboy]

yeah, theyre called the over 80yo elderly in nursing homes who just got their computers installed so they can play online casinos.

Re:Humanity

[ceeam]

Do you think Internet growth is all by experienced users gemmating?

Re:Humanity

[Tom]

which makes me just as vulnerable to some new scam that has a bit more intelligence behind it...

Not necessarily. One of the famous con artists in the early 20th century once said that you can only con the greedy, because they're the ones buying into your con, they want to believe in whatever bullshit you're selling, because it satisfies their desire for quick money (or sex, or whatever else).

Re:It makes no difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

Teach people to properly filter and not to respond

Is this supposed to be funny?

Re:All that money

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how many of the inmates at his prison bought penis stretchers and dick growers? Anyone calculated the number of inches of prison treatment he's gonna get per spam sent?

How much is your freedom worth?

[3arwax]

How much money would it some have to pay you to do 9 years in jail? Then how long would it be for you were willing to give all of the money back for your freedom? Only email provider based filters really work at stopping spam because people who use individual filters wouldn't buy stuff anyway.

Re:How much is your freedom worth?

[Antique Geekmeister]

There is no way in hell this guy is going to jail for nine years. Despite his blatant fraud, the Direct Marketing Association is lending him legal support lest precedents get set that will encumber their commercial spam and junk mail. The ISP that sold him the multiple T1's or T3's is doubtless going to help out in court as well, to avoid liability for their laxity in not acting against all the complaints.

Even Sanford Wallace, the king of spam at cyberpromo.com for some years, is already back in business after numerous court losses, which he normally handled by settling out of court before he could be convicted.

Expect a "stiff fine" at worst for this spammer, and for him to be back in business within six months.

Re:How much is your freedom worth?

[Anonymous Coward]

One million. They pay my rent and utilities and feed me and I make a little more than I do now.

Shit, tomorrow's inbox...

[SnapShot]

EARN $300,000 to $750,000 PER MONTH working from the PRIVACY of your own HOME!!!!
JEREMY JAMES did IT, SO CAN YOU!!!!!!!
THIS is NOT a SCAM, It REALLY works!!!!!
FOR MORE information MAIL TO make_millions.com

Besides,

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Ins,t he really D.B. Cooper?

"Think of the CHILDREN!"

[antispam_ben]

While most will probably scoff at what I'm saying (mod me down, but read first if you don't mind),

Sorry, I don't have mod points right now, and I'd rather reply to these comments anyway.

While most will probably scoff at what I'm saying (mod me down, but read first if you don't mind), can you imagine the number of trees had this been a junk-mail business?

1. If it had been junk mail through the USPS, the sender would have paid for those threes, as well as the cost of turning them into paper, the ink, the copywriter (when you spend real money on real advertisements, it's worth it to make it professional), AND the postage.

2. Trees used to make paper are a renewable resource. They don't make paper from old-growth hardwoods from rain forests.

3. Spam is extra-low-cost advertising to the spammer. Getting spams inso email inboxes is a few orders of magnitude lower in cost than getting the same number of flyers (legally) into the same number of postal mailboxes. There's no comparison: Spammers would not bother if they had to pay what it costs, even with USPS bulk rate and advertising rate, to send their messages through the USPS.

OMFG

[Anonymous Coward]

A millionaire from firing off e-mail every day? Boy did I waste my time in school. So much for that masters in engineering.

9 Years is Not Enough

[zentec]

The sending of the spam was bad enough, the bigger problem is that this putz was engaging in fraud, plain and simple.

His attorney can argue free speech and the unconstitutional aspects of the CAN-SPAM act all he wants, the fact remains that he misled people using spam and sold them products and services of no value whatsoever.

Crime does indeed pay, and this shows it pays handsomely. Now the courts need to AGAIN provide some negative reinforement of that fact and lock this clown away with Andrew Fastow and the rest of the classic white collar criminals.

Re:9 Years is Not Enough

[Anonymous Coward]

2 things: 1. this guy is a small operator. The biggest smapper I know of was sending at one point over 200 mil. messages a day. 2. the ISP was well aware of the operation. My ISP will kill my company's account is less than 24h for spamming.

Re:9 Years is Not Enough

[Tablizer]

His attorney can argue free speech and the unconstitutional aspects of the CAN-SPAM act all he wants, the fact remains that he misled people using spam and sold them products and services of no value whatsoever.

I think the main thing he is being busted on is forging the source of the spam. It would be like making up a non-existent company so that customers cannot sue you.

Re:9 Years is Not Enough

[idiotnot]

He wasn't convicted under CAN-SPAM, he was convicted under Virginia's Anti-Spam law, passed before CAN-SPAM, and more stringent. Virginia is long-arming the spammers, because the way the law is written, any spam that travels over telco in the Commonwealth, Virginia has can prosecute. Since some ungodly percentage of the world's internet traffic travels through Northern Virginia, there is a real potential that many spammers will be residing in correctional facilities in the Old Dominion soon.

drug dealing

[Anonymous Coward]

seems even less desireable now. you can make bank and not end up getting shot this way. he probably won't even serve the full 9 years. not too shabby if you don't really have many alternatives. watch for organized crime or some other criminal element to get in on this.

$50,000 = $750,000
quite a profit.

Re:It makes no difference.

[Deorus]

I thought I was the only one doing it in a simple way. In fact what I use is just Postfix (with some PERL Compatible Regular Expressions). My E-mail address is just as exposed on Slashdot as the parent's and I can confirm that he's right. The last month, the only thing I could consider spam was a 419 scam message, although my maillogs are full of filter warnings. I use to look in the maillogs regularly for false positives, and at least in the last 4 months I've had none.

I won't be too specific on what kinds of filters I use (because otherwise I would be giving spammers hints on how to circumvent them), but basically weird things that shouldn't go on regular E-mail messages are easy to spot and filter. First of all: almost all spam comes as HTML formatted E-mail. Having that in mind you can start filtering out strange things such as border thicknesses around pictures and tables, form tags, unordered and ordered listings, images inside hyperlinks, input and form tags, frames, iframes, and whatever else you find inappropriate for regular E-mail messages. For plain-text spam you can simply filter out words such as "revenue", "furnish", "\$[0-9.]{3}", "MIL?ION.*DOL?ARS", etc. Last but not least, remember to filter out certain MIME types such as "binary/octet-stream" and file extensions such as ".exe", ".com", ".bat", ".vbs", ".pif", etc.

Remember that these are just knee-jerk hints based on my own experience. I recommend you to read your E-mail sources carefully in order to find patterns which allow you to clearly track and filter spam. What you filter depends on you and your company's needs and policies, so I recommend you to redirect messages to a spamdrop account instead of filtering them all right away to make sure there aren't false positives in the first few months. If the filters do well, replace your REDIRECT rules by a REJECT ones and enjoy your new quite mailbox.

Ok, Fine

[nate nice]

OK, you have spoken and I maybe it is evil. My point is not to cuddle these people, but realize you cannot stop it. In fact, I don't think you can deter it. We still have a plentyful supply of drugs. It cost a lot of money to jail someone and I'm not sure I feel that threatened by spammers such that I want to pay to take them off the streets.

But, some of you make good points and amke note of things I did not think of. MAybe as it is, spammers do need to be criminalized. Maybe in the future we can desing a system that will benefit everyone?

Re:Ok, Fine

[nate nice]

"OK, you have spoken and I maybe it is evil"

That should read, "OK, you have spoken and I maybe you're right, it is evil"

You know what, I tink I got the retard helemt on today. HAd a few beers, etc. Just not clicking today.

Idiots?

[hkb]

"When you're marketing to the world, there are enough idiots out there"

Those "idiots" often being trusting elderly people who don't know any better,perhaps your mother, your father, your grandmother.

Re:Idiots?

[farmhick]

That's why I don't let my mother-in-law on the computer.

Of course, the bulk of email messages I hate to see contain the words, "Order confirmation..." from Gap, OldNavy, Disney, Victoria Secret, and a few other sites my wife spends all our money at. If I could get those companies branded as spammers, and sue them for a million bucks, I would be happy. But then again, my wife would just use the money to buy more crap from them.

Re:Idiots?

[Anonymous Coward]

just because they are old doesn't give them a lisense to be retarted. It's not like at some age you get to stop thinking and just expect everyone to accomodate you. If that is the case, that old people are just expected to be retarted and not know any better, then they should be stripped of all rights that require intelligent thought like voting and driving a car (which should probably be the case anyway)

Re:Idiots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Old people are stupid.

Re:Idiots?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't spell retarded, just don't bother.

Re:Idiots?

[Repton]

Well, y'know, twenty, thirty, forty years ago, these elderly people were adults in the prime of their lives. And fraudsters selling snake oil are not exactly a new phenomonon.

How old do you have to be before you stop being an idiot and start being a trusting elderly person who doesn't know any better?

Re:Idiots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those "idiots" often being trusting elderly people who don't know any better,perhaps your mother, your father, your grandmother.

Oh snap! That means blood!
Yo elderly momma's so trusting she bought viagkra!

Tax spam? Won't work.

[cduffy]

If it were just spam, maybe you'd have a point. Maybe. I don't think so, but there are other people arguing the point, so I'll leave it to them.

The key distinction you're missing is that this fellow was committing fraud -- promising people jobs (if they'd pay some money up-front) and giving them lists of completely useless information, among other things. Mass email was just the mechanism. His prosecution, thus, was totally legit -- on that point alone!

Taxing spam would be difficult. Folks who are willing to commit fraud (as most spammers are) and hide their identities (as most spammers do) aren't likely to shake at the thought of a bit of tax evasion. And if you were to implement it somehow, and make it stick -- how do you distribute the money? Much of the internet's infrastructure is privately owned; would you give it to the involved companies, and ask them to be nice and please spend it on modernization? Would you use it to upgrade government-owned 'net usage? What good does that do to folks not getting their access via a .edu?

If you've got the ability to find and prosecute these folks for tax evasion (as you must have to make a tax stick), you've got the ability to find and prosecute them for fraud, or sending unsolicited commercial email, or anything else. Declaring a pretend tax to legitimize spam is useless as an antispam measure, and likely to do more harm than good.

s/binary/application

[Deorus]

"binary/octet-stream" was supposed to be "application/octet-stream"

The sentencing

[Henrik S. Hansen]

He gets 9 years? I think that's very extreme. In Denmark, my country, murderers can get less than that (IIRC, 16 years is max. penalty for any crime, incl. manslaughter).

Seriously, think about getting 9 years cut off your life. It's a very long time. And he only sent out some bulk advertising.

The issue here is how cultures and nations view people. In Denmark, the focus is on treatment of both criminals and their victims -- it's not just an issue of retaliation against the criminal. In the same spirit, noone (or only a miniscule minority) in Denmark wants the death penalty, it's totally against the danish way of thinking.

This is one of the reasons I like living in Denmark. In my mind, it's the mark of a modern nation to make an effort to resocialize criminals -- it's backwards to only say 'an eye for an eye'.

Re:The sentencing

[Anonymous Coward]

if you think of the seriousness of a crime as the losses it causes other people then how is losing one life worth than total losses to the victims as a whole of many lifetimes

sentances must be strict enough to deter the crime im not sure this one is

Re:The sentencing

[Antique Geekmeister]

Even if sentenced to 9 years (which is extraordinarily unlikely), he's unlikely to spend more than a year in jail. It's not a violent set of crimes, the US jails are overloaded with poor convicts on various drug charges, and he'd be extremely likely to be on parole. He's got the smarts and social skills to run a significantly sized business, the parole board is unlikely to hold him in jail a moment more than necessary.

Re:The sentencing

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably won't serve anywhere near 9 years in prison. Mandatory minimum requirements usually only apply in cases of violent crime. Without such a minimum, it's theoretically possible to get out in 25-30% of the maximum sentence using work credits and good behavior allowances. I imagine he'll serve less than half the time in prison- that is, if he doesn't use some of his millions to get his conviction overturned.

Re:The sentencing

[Henrik S. Hansen]

sentances must be strict enough to deter the crime

That argument is useless. If strict sentences meant no or very little crime, why are there still so many murderers in Texas (a state with the death penalty, and not afraid to use it)? The truth is that there's just no evidence to suggest harsh crimes can be avoided with stricter sentencing.

Re:The sentencing

[Henrik S. Hansen]

Ah, 1 year sounds more reasonable.

Re:The sentencing

[Anonymous Coward]

Bear in mind that the US executes a lot of people every year... and in at least one state, you can get life for a very minor offense, if it's your 'third strike'.

Make no mistake - a lot of USAans are just ignorant hicks bent on Old-Testament-style vengeance. It's not just the president.

Re:The sentencing

[DongleFondle]

Well, you Danish are a beautiful people. However, In the Good ol' "Yew Es a' Aye", we call it the "justice" system for a reason. The historical backing reaching all the way to our present justice system does not believe in punishment for rehabilitation or even to act as a deterrent for crime (although many in this country argue that strong sentencing deters crime, this is complete bunk and there is absolutely NO evidence to support such a theory).

No, the reason for our criminal punishment system in the US has always been and still is compensation for the victim and/or victim's families, and as a plain simple punishment to those who have done wrong. As you so aptly put, "An eye for an eye", is just the way most people see things here. American's LOVE justice! They love to hate criminals, and they love to punish them. That is, until they find through the varying circumstances of life that they are all of sudden on the other side of the criminal fence, be it a speeding ticket or a drunken bar fight. Why THEN, you've never seen such righteous indignation at the brutal inequality of our laws. ;-)

You're way may well be a better way of dealing with crime, but trust me, things are not changing around here anytime soon.

Re:The sentencing

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, people doing these crimes think they won't get caught. Stiff penalties won't deter anything in that case.

Re:The sentencing

[ravenspear]

And he only sent out some bulk advertising.

Wrong. He also committed fraud. He was selling products that he knew didn't do what he said they did.

Re:The sentencing

[Henrik S. Hansen]

I agree that a certain degree of punishment is called for in most
cases. But it is not something one should love doing, especially
because most criminals are really just victims too. You may write
that off as leftist crap, but it's the plain truth. Hardened
criminals, even the top crime bosses, are not happy people.

Of course, you may disregard CEO's, Free masons, presidents, etc.
That's a different kind of criminal, a socially-accepted criminal. An
entirely different ball game.

Re:The sentencing

[Coryoth]

He gets 9 years? I think that's very extreme....It's a very long time. And he only sent out some bulk advertising.

He got 9 years for criminal fraud because he was fraudelently selling goods. Basically everything he sold was a complete scam. He committed literally many many milltions of dollars in fraud (half a million dollars a month on average). The fact that he did this by scamming hundreds and thousands of people out of a small amount of cash instead of the usual where you scam a few people for vast sums of money each doesn't really make a difference in the total amount of harm he caused.

To some extent I agree, 9 years is harsh, but it is in line with the rest of US sentencing, which is equally harsh. Just keep in mind: 9 years in jail for multi-million dollar fraud, not 9 years in jail for bulk advertising.

Jedidiah.

Re:The sentencing

[DongleFondle]

Yeah, I agree. Wasn't that somewhat clear form my post? That's exactly why people become indignant and fight tooth and nail to get out of it when the law finally applies to them (See: Ken Lay for more information).

And I wouldn't call it leftist-crap, I call it naturalist-crap. (See: "An American Tragedy" for more information.) ;-)

Re:The sentencing

[Anonymous Coward]

kartoffel

Re:The sentencing

[KD5YPT]

Just as a joke... don't take this seriously...

If there are many murderers in Texas, it just mean we haven't round them all up and put them down yet.

Re:The sentencing

[cheekyboy]

He might start collecting the inmates email addresses and start again from the inside if there >1 year. He might teach all the brain dead idiots on how to be a spammer for a small outlay and how not to get caught this time.

Re:The sentencing

[cheekyboy]

If a state can legally do an execution, then it has by defaulted and made a crime in it self, so the state must be executed, but it cant, so it should not be legal to execute any one because you cannot 'undo it' if you make a mistake and the govt has made countless mistakes (and those DA keep working).

It should NOT be possible to have a law that only applies to "SOME INDIVIDUALS" , thats called a MAFIA ORG

Re:The sentencing

[MichaelSmith]

In Denmark, my country, murderers can get less than that (IIRC, 16 years is max. penalty for any crime, incl. manslaughter).

Here in Australia some murderers get less than that as well, but what would you do with somebody who killed 300 children in a school siege? Would he get the max, 16 years?

We don't have the death here penalty either, but there is a recognition that some people should never be released.

Perhaps I have missed something here, but this policy seems very lenient

Re:The sentencing

[zijus]

...'an eye for an eye'.

FYI. This quote is often misinterpreted as something like "be as violent to your enemy as he was with you." The saying actually aims at expressing right the opposite view which is 'be measured enough to get only an eye or a teeth, if that's all what your enemy "got" from you'.

In other words, applying the 'eye for an eye' would lead to what you suggest: not jailing a man for 9 years for a few (feekin #*%$! aaaarg I hate them) millions spam, when a killer could be jailed for 5 years only.

Ciao ciao.

Re:The sentencing

[relaxrelax]

But in Denmark, would the government be smart enough to seize ALL money made fraudulently?

If not, then spammers might want to move to Denmark so they can get more $ per year in jail.

Not to mention less prison rape, and more job training.

Re:The sentencing

[Tom]

And he only sent out some bulk advertising.

Your definition of "some" is funny. 10 million spam mailsper day. Mind if I beat "some" sense into you?

It's not quality alone, it's quality times quantity. Just the way killing 10 people is worse and will yield a higher sentence than killing one, so sending a few spam mails would get a tiny sentence, but sending several billion over time yields a much higher one.

As for treatment of the criminal - I sure do hope that he gets some "treatment". I also hope they air it live, so the other spammers can consider again whether or not getting a job might be an option.

Re:The sentencing

[JuggleGeek]

This is one of the reasons I like living in Denmark.

You like living in Denmark because murder is only a minor offense there?

Re:The sentencing

[fireboy1919]

Keep reading. If you're reading it from the Bible, and not the Torah, you'll find that Jesus said that even this was too much - that judgement should include mercy "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Eye for an eye specifies a specific level of punishment, not a minimum, not a maximum.

Someone who defrauds one person can get a year or so. Doesn't the sheer quantity of the crimes mean he should end up spending a couple hundred years?

Yes, they're evil.

[Cid Highwind]

Spammers abuse other people's bandwidth, server storage space, sysadmin time, and sanity for personal gain. Dealing with spam cost the global economy something like 9 billion dollars in bandwidth alone. Add to that another $10 billion or so in time wasted deleting spam, and who knows how much money spent on spam filtering, and you have a significant amount of money being wasted. Fortunately for the spammers, they don't pay that cost. Everyone else using the internet pays, whether they want to or not. The entire spamming business model is based on stealing resources from everyone else on the internet. That's evil.

Perhaps monatary fines, like 40% of their income would be fair?
I would consider anything less than 100% unfair.

They haven't hurt anyone, and really are running an innovative business, as far as marketing is innovative.
If spamming is an "innovative business", then so is stealing radios out of parked cars and selling them.

My point is, we as a society could profit form these people.
No, we can't. The profit spammers make is less than the cost of spam to everyone else on the internet.

No matter what, a spammer taken off the Net today will be replaced by another yesterday. It's a battle you cannot win.
That's true for any criminal. It doesn't mean we need to replace the whole justice system with a 40% tax on crime.

Re:Yes, they're evil.

[nate nice]

Good points. Well taken.

Re:Yes, they're evil.

[KD5YPT]

I would consider ceasing all that person's asset plus a few year jail sentence on 1st offence and a lifelong ban on use of computer.

The Hero of Canton

[natrius]

He robbed from the rich And he gave to the poor Stood up to the man And gave him what for Our love for him now Ain't hard to explain The hero of Canton The man they call Jayne

Re:The Hero of Canton

[DourSalmon]

He made himself rich
And he stole from the dumb
But now he's called 'Bitch'
As he's suckin' his thumb.
A hundred different ways
To get a shiv in the ribs,
A hundred different inmates,
Each shouting: "Dibs!"
The story of "The Spammer"
Was so previously sad
But with this new ending...
Well...
This one ain't that bad.

It's a start anyway.

The Hero of Canton

[natrius]

He robbed from the rich
And he gave to the poor
Stood up to the man
And gave him what for
Our love for him now
Ain't hard to explain
The hero of Canton
The man they call Jayne

ISP suspicion?

[joelanders]

So this guy has 16 T1 lines and nobody from his ISP decides he might be doing something shady? Maybe as long as they're pulling in his cash every month, they didn't care. Still 16!? Damn kid, try to fly under the radar next time.

Re:ISP suspicion?

[Antique Geekmeister]

It's called a "pink contract", a business contract with the clauses that normally forbid business like spamming carefully left out. They're quite common for struggling ISP's, which normally make sure the bandwidth is paid for up front. agis.net did this for quite some time with Cyberpromo, until the crackers took their routers down and kept them down until Cyberpromo went offline. But it took almost 2 years to get people worked up enough that the crackers would do this.

How many years would Jesus do?

[gelfling]

9 years for spam in VIRGINIA the birthplace of the Tax FREE Televangelical Money Church? The home of the 700 Club and Jerry Falwell? The prosecutor should rot in fucking hell forever.

Re:How many years would Jesus do?

[fmaxwell]

9 years for spam in VIRGINIA the birthplace of the Tax FREE Televangelical Money Church? The home of the 700 Club and Jerry Falwell? The prosecutor should rot in fucking hell forever.

The prosecutor should get sainthood. That fuckwad spammer was wasting the time, bandwidth and storage of millions of people, companies, and ISPs. He sent out 10 million spams per month. That's 120 million spams per year. Assuming that it takes the average person 3 seconds to download, recognize, and delete a piece of spam, that' 360 million seconds per year he's stolen from people's lives. That's over 11.4 years! That doesn't even take into account the cost that others paid for bandwidth and storage for his unwanted e-mail ads. Hell, 9 years isn't even close to enough time given the magnitude of what he was doing.

As to the televangelists and the idiots they dupe out of money, blame the religious right and the Republicans who they vote into office, not the prosecutor who tried to keep some ass-lick from filling our e-mail inboxes.

Your penis is just fine

[Lead Butthead]

"Your penis is just fine. You don't need penis enlargement pills. Move along, there's nothing to buy."

For those unfamiliar with da Wu:

[div_B]

Cash Rules Everything Around Me.

I saw an interview with some of the members explaining that the implication is that cash doesn't rule me, just because it rules everything else. Interesting, if perhaps at odds with some of the other lyrics. ;)

And Ken Lay is still free...

[calstraycat]

Hey, I'm all for putting the perpetrators of fraud behind bars, but sure wish they would go after the big fish.

I guess the lesson here is that it's better commit fraud publicly on a massive scale -- and have friends in high places -- then it is to commit fraud quietly from your back bedroom.

Re:And Ken Lay is still free...

[Animats]

Ken Lay was arrested and is out on bail. See him in handcuffs here.

First the prosecutors went after Ben Glisan, Enron's treasurer. He's now Federal inmate #20293-179 at FDC Houston and is scheduled for release in 2008.

Once Glisan talked, the prosecutors went after Andrew Fastow, Enron's CFO, and his wife, who helped with those "offshore entities". She's now inmate #20290-179 at FDC Houston and is scheduled for release in 2005. Andrew Fastow has pled guilty and is "cooperating with prosecutors", which will affect the length of his sentence. So he gave up Ken Lay. Andrew Fastow will still do quite a few years in prison; the original indictment specified over a thousand years.

Lay, Skilling, and Causey go on trial together in March 2005. We'll probably have a few more inmate numbers after that.

Re:And Ken Lay is still free...

[calstraycat]

All true. But, I won't be satisfied until his butt is sitting in a penitentiary -- for life. If the spammer gets nine years, then I think Mr. Lay would need a significantly longer term if convicted.

Anyway, I hope my cynicism is misplaced this time, but savings and loan debacle of the eighties left me a bit jaded. They finally convicted a few of the high profile racketeers, but only sent them to a country club prison for a couple of years.

Before you knew it, they were out writing books and teaching economics at the university. I doubt the outcome will be much different this time. I hope I'm wrong.

Some more:

[div_B]

So the ratio is 63.4 spam messages per second of prison time

9 years jail time = 78,840 hours
Estimated profit = $24,000,000
So hourly rate = $304 /hr
Good rate, but very long hours (24-7), not the most glamorous position, and little possibility of advancement. ;)

Re:Some more:

[wirelessbuzzers]

Good rate, but very long hours (24-7), not the most glamorous position, and little possibility of advancement. ;)

True, but he gets room and board, and he has a 9-year contract.

Nice

[dusanv]

Do you mind if I move in for a year and make myself 24 million bucks peddling fraudulent crap?

Fat, Balding, and Ugly at age 30.

[trolman]

From the looks of him it appears that he was using his products.

Several questions worth considering

[mikew03]

1) Why aren't Visa/Mastercard/AMEX/Etc... also liable in cases like this? It seems like we could put a huge brake on Spam if the credit card companies had some responsibility? Also why would the bank cards tolerate this anyway, the chargeback rate must have been enourmous.

2) How did he hook into the internet with 5 high speed lines that did nothing but send email all day? Surely this traffic could be detected and blocked at the source.

3) How come spam doesn't burn out like a pyramid scheme? Surely the number of gullible people are finite. All of these spammers use the same lists. There has to be a point where every single person spammable has been reached. And surely by the gigantic volume we all get we must be close to that point.

Re:Several questions worth considering

[Anonymous Coward]

As a consumer, if my credit card company started blocking my willful transactions, I'd tell them to take a hike and I'd go find a new one. There's no way in hell the credit card companies should control how their clients spend their own money.

Re:Several questions worth considering

[Medevo]

1)
Credit Card Companies arent liable for fruad per direct fault, its more assoicated with being part of the goods deliverly process. A credit card company should only take orders from a server that will correctly respond to both the withdraw as well as correct functions. I am pretty sure that if you ignored these, the card companies would stop taking orders from you pretty darn quick. It came down to that people didnt go to the card companies to demand there money back, they went to the spammer.

2)
For home users with broadband, ISP's generally tend to care if you use alot of bandwidth, but he was spending 50,000 a year for 10 T1 Lines. These are DESIGNED for a high and substained bandwidth, and thats what he paid for. His contract with his ISP likly specified a limit (TB/Month?) but he could easily handle any overage charges.

3)
New people are coming onto the internet every day, and by raw numbers, at least some of them are going to be gullible. There are many other factors that can overcome the logic that says "THIS IS A SCAM, IGNORE" such as depression, poor education, peer pressure, etc.

Medevo

Re:Several questions worth considering

[Tom]

How come spam doesn't burn out like a pyramid scheme?

The stupid breed.

Hey, with all that spam for viagra, penis enlargement and porn paysites, it really shouldn't come as a surprise.

PMFG! THAT ROOLES!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That is absolutely outstanding. The guy was likely netting $300k per month, assuming the $750k was a really bloated figure.

Think about it, sysadmins. You could be rolling in the dough, right now. A couple of good months, and you could pay off your house and car, and take a 2 week vacation in the Carribean.

How come he is still alive?

[The MESMERIC]

I really don't get it.

Conspiricy to commit a felony?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could stop this all in a heart-beat if you would sue the companies who pay the spammers. Is this conspiricy to commit a felony or perhaps aiding and abetting? (AINAL)
This has been said before, but it does not seem to register: Follow The Money.
If this man earned $750,000/month in commission you could sue the people who paid him and really make it hurt.
Their profits plus damages equals millions.

Re:Conspiricy to commit a felony?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, conspiracy.

Screw prison

[Thaelon]

I think he should have to spend 9 years doing tech support (not counting hours not on the job) without possibility of promotion; of course monitored heavily so that he can't just start spamming at work. Pay him minimum wage without possibility of a raise. If he doesn't show up for work, then send him to jail and let bubba spam his port.

Cry me a river

[crimson30]

You are missing the prime principality of the matter. The guy is human scum, pure and simple. He knows that he is out to scam people and he doesn't give a moment's consideration about anybody but himself. He doesn't care who he inconveniences or who he scams.

What you fail to see is that it's not what he's done in and of itself, so much as what sort of person he is for having done it. There are enough people in the world right about now. One less piece of shit would do the world better!

MOD PARENT RETARTED!

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT RETARTED!

IAWTP

[Anonymous Coward]

+1, informadive.

A good way to get caught....

[mkiwi]

All right, let's say that a person earns more than $500,000 per year doing some sort of work. We know this person owns his own business (or is running a fradulent one ^_^), so they pay business taxes to the government, as well as state income tax, federal income tax, and sales tax (Yes, companies are responsible for getting sales tax permits in every state they do x amount of dollars of business with).

Looking at the facts, the company (since it was one man) would be a sole proprietorship under most laws. He cannot claim that their company is a corporation, since the US will not allow you to incorporate without sufficient reason. Note that Apple Computer, Inc. started out as Apple Computer (NO, .INC) as an example.

When one looks at one person running a single business earning tons of money for seemingly no reason at all, the IRS will most likely do an audit of their taxes and find out how said person got the money. If it looks suspicious, they contact state and/or federal investigators.

The moral of the story: If you make millions of dollars with spam every year, do not buy a one million dollar house. Do not click Buy with your mouse. Do not take more bandwidth than you should, even if you knew you could. Do not eat green eggs and ham, just be cool and like your spam.

Penalty for spammers

[Zathras26]

How does this sound?

Spammers don't get a fixed prison sentence. Instead, you put them in a prison cell that has an electronic lock with a keypad inside the cell. The combination is, say, twelve digits long, so there's no way in hell the prisoner can ever guess it.

Now you give the spammer a dumb terminal with shell access and an email account (incoming only) and no spam filtering. You send him the same amount of spam each day that he was sending out, except that one of the incoming emails will have the combination to the door. He has to find it himself. Until he can, he's stuck in the cell.

Poetic justice. Just as we regular users have to go to all this trouble with spam filtering and everything else, he'll have to go crazy looking for the combination that will allow him to regain his freedom.

Re:Penalty for spammers

[Anonymous Coward]

you are evil

Re:Penalty for spammers

[invalid_user]

I think letting him out is unacceptable. I offer a better idea.

The spammer is given fixed duration prison sentence. In the cell he gets a terminal to read email --- with no spam filtering software, so he gets spammed _exactly_ like everybody else. Everyday he is sent a mail containing a combination to a door, through which his meals are delivered.

This way, there is even a hope that he would starve to death from his colleagues' work! YeeeHaaaw!

Re:Penalty for spammers

[AnalogDiehard]

Good, but the combination should be alphanumeric (to increase the codebreaking odds to astronomical heights) and the combination changes daily so he has to consume an entire day's energy each day looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Re:Penalty for spammers

[overbom]

I wouldn't give them shell access -- spammers could use shell scripting to grep for all 12 digit numbers in their mbox. Your idea needs work, but I like your starting point: the spammer is in prison.

Disproportion of punishment to crime...

[Biomechanical]

9 years in prison for what amounts to shoddy dealings.

Who was killed by Jeremy? Who was maimed by Jeremy? Who was raped by Jeremy?

Sure, fraud isn't nice, but wouldn't a more effective punishment, and deterrent for others, be to simply take away everything he's bought and accrued?

All money? Gone. All property? Gone. Divide it up and spread it around his home state's health and education services.

Make him bankrupt and let him get back on his feet like any other poor person with the threat hanging over his head that if he does one more illegal thing to do with fraud or money, then into prison he goes for a couple of years.

Murder, Rape, Arson, Assault with a Deadly Weapon, Armed Robbery... Things that actually do people or property physical harm can get less time than this.

His sentence isn't justice, it's ego-driven revenge.

Re:Disproportion of punishment to crime...

[Biomechanical]

[Minor correction]

If those people who purchased "goods" from Jeremy can be tracked down, they should receive a full refund out of his accrued monies.

If not, then the state's health and education services should get them.

Re:Disproportion of punishment to crime...

[dubl-u]

9 years in prison for what amounts to shoddy dealings. [...] Who was killed by Jeremy? Who was maimed by Jeremy? Who was raped by Jeremy?

I'm sure you think it's reasonable when a multiple murderer gets multiple sentences, right? Ok, good. Next decide what you think an appropriate sentence for stealing $40 is. Ready? Let's do some math.

The articles are lacking in hard numbers, but suppose that this guy ran his operation for a year, and that he averaged 10,000 suckers a month. That would mean 120,000 people defrauded. So 9 years would mean circa 39 minutes of time served per victim.

And that doesn't leave anything left over for the millions of people bothered by his spam, the millions of dollars in other people's resources he consumed, the time consumed in many months of tracking him down, or the harm done to the fabric of trust that makes internet commerce possible.

So no, turning him loose and saying, "Naughty naughty!" doesn't seem like appropriate punishment. Especially given that this guy was a hardcore scammer for years, one who set up more than 30 fake companies to hide his dealings.

Re:Disproportion of punishment to crime...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you copy and distribute 20 movies with 5 years imprisonment for each offence, should you die in prison? By your logic, yes. Your argument using murder as some sort of legal analog to spamming needs refinement. F.

Re:Disproportion of punishment to crime...

[Biomechanical]

I'm not saying he should be released with a simple "Naughty naughty!". I'd think that taking all of his material possessions and monetary wealth would be a pretty big punishment to a man who's made his life and living making "easy" money.

Add to that the promise that a minor infraction would land him in the pokey and I'd suspect that either, he'd go straight, or he'd be a better criminal later.

That's not perfect obviously, and I'm still thinking about the fine details.

I just think that there is something inherently wrong in a system that can punish non-violent criminals more then violent criminals.

A little OT, murder is a harsh thing, no less harsh than if it's done by the state or an individual.

You didn't bring this up but I'll use it as an illustration:

The death penalty goes beyond punishment in this case and verges into revenge, and a multiple sentence is preferable to simply killing the murderer.

What if s/he's an athiest? They won't regard it as punishment, merely the state "getting back at them".

$40? If you stole fourty dollars from a little old lady, I'd hold you down and let that little old lady kick the crap out of you. If it was a big multinational corporation, I'd do nothing, but I'd probably tell you,

`When they stole that money by cheating customers with shoddy merchandise, you became a parasite by stealing from the thieves.'

It's not hypocritical on my part until I say I'm not a parasite and then do the exact same thing.

Crime and punishment should be proportionate, and actually make the criminal feel sorry for what they have done. Otherwise it is simply state-endorsed revenge, and just as ugly and wrong as the crime committed.

Re:Disproportion of punishment to crime...

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly if he gets to keep his millions then 9 years in jail IS NOT PUNISHMENT. It is not justice.

If he had cocain or mary-j he would lose everything. Why does this guy get to keep his ill gotten booty?

So he spends his 9 years in prison. Sure that isnt a a day at the beach but after he is out is he set for the rest of his life. never has to work again.

How old is this guy again?

He is 30 now. If he spent ALL of that 9 years actually in prison he is still retiring without worry at 40.

Who says crime doesnt pay.

Re:Disproportion of punishment to crime...

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the part where he gets his "shit pushed in".

Re:Disproportion of punishment to crime...

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the part where he gets his "shit pushed in".

Re:Disproportion of punishment to crime...

[relaxrelax]

People spent 567 years deleting his junk mail, as 1 second per mail.

That's like taking 7 or 8 lifetimes away completely - from birth to old age!

In bandwidth alone, he wasted 50 000$ a month at the receiver end. That's vandalism!

Add the cost of commercial spam filters (plus the time installing a filter), and you'll forget about when the government wastes 1 billion, bub.

9 years is kinda OK with me. But I have to agree I'd rather have him lose ALL his fraudulently-gained money than have the jail time; but ideally I'd want both.

Re:Disproportion of punishment to crime...

[dubl-u]

I'd think that taking all of his material possessions and monetary wealth would be a pretty big punishment to a man who's made his life and living making "easy" money.

Maybe. Maybe not. He's been doing this for years, and has taken a lot of actions that show that he obviously knows what he is doing is criminal, so that may not reform him.

But there are also others to consider. Suppose your chance of getting caught while doing this is 50%. If it's a 50/50 flip between millions of dollars and probation, is that sufficient disincentive to stop others from doing this? Probably not. But if it's 50/50 between millions of dollars or a decade in prison, it's a different story.

barbarians

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that country of yours supposed to be so better than Iraq?

Method to kill spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I have this idea. If these guys that send spam make so much money than we can all do it and they will make much _MUCH_ less profit as a result thus bankrupting them. Of course with this we'll also clog the net and waste the email system completely.

Dont post such profits to slashdot!

[mnmn]

Any idea what will happen if you tell all slashdot geeks how much they could be making if they were spammers?

Sure there will always be someone spamming our mailboxes, but put out the bait to the smartest bunch, and youve just made the world a miserable place (at least online).

The govt should post a reward of $700,000 for anyone who seeks and gets enough spammers to reduce online spam by 2% or something. Being on morality's side, greedy slashdotters could then clean up the Internet, at least in western countries.

What about the big fish?

[diver5253]

But he earned $40 a pop So who was paying the $40 a pop? And why aren't they in Club Fed right alongside Mr Jayne?

Re:What about the big fish?

[CaptainTux]

Because, if I remember correctly, there is absolutely nothing illegal about *sending* spam. The problem comes from forged headers and not allowing recipients to remove themselves from the lists.

disproportionate

[Anonymous Coward]

I think everyone agrees that spammers deserve to be shut down, and their profits stripped from them, but the sentencing is another example of 2-tier law. 9 years? If someone physically assaults me and puts me in hospital, they would never do this sort of time - regardless of what the 'maximum' penalty is.
When public companies kill people either directly or through inaction, they are fined. If you or I copy a DVD we face prison. If a CEO steals millions, they become vice presidents, or at least televangelists. Where's the fucking parity?

Re:disproportionate

[mikera]

If someone physically assaults you and puts you in hospital, you might have lost a couple of weeks of your life, plus some emotional distress.

This guys was sending 10 million emails a day. Assume each email wastes just 1second of someones time. In one year of operation, he will have wasted over 100 man-years of people's lives. In my view, that's morally equivalent to killing two people.

I think 9 years is remarkably light. I'd bring back crucifixion.

Re:disproportionate

[Anonymous Coward]

This guys was sending 10 million emails a day. Assume each email wastes just 1second of someones time. In one year of operation, he will have wasted over 100 man-years of people's lives. In my view, that's morally equivalent to killing two people.

MORALLY equivalent? What the fuck is wrong with you?

sensationalist article

[Anonymous Coward]

they found 16 T-1 data lines connected to the house. With that much capacity, someone could download a full-length movie in one minute. Using a standard dial-up modem it would take seven hours.

Really? I have a T1 and downloading a DVD quality movie (4.5 GB) takes about 8.9 hours. They have 16 times the capacity but are downloading 536 times faster than me.

If I had 16 T1's, it would take me 33 minutes at my current quality level, so their movies must be 1/33rd the quality of a DVD, that must be really nice!! No wonder the MPAA is starving!

Re:sensationalist article

[mikael_j]

Uhm, just a quick off the top of my head and way too early in the morning calculation:

4.5GB = 4608MB
T1 = 1.5Mbps (not sure about this, I'm in Sweden, we have E1 lines, 2Mbps)
so 4608/1.5 = 3072 seconds per movie at full capacity which is the same as 51 minutes and 12 seconds. /Mikael

Re:sensationalist article

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope

I have a T1, and I can pull 185 kilobytes/sec solid. Divide by 1024, and that equals one megabyte every 5.53 seconds.

4500 megabytes for a movie, and you're looking at 4500 * 5.53 = 24,885 seconds for a movie.

Divide by 60 and thats 414.75 minutes.

Divide by 60 and thats 6.91 hours for a movie.

For my T1, the original poster is closer than your 51 minute estimate. I believe your problem is dividing 4608 megabytes by 1.5 megabits

Re:sensationalist article

[mikael_j]

Oops, that's what I get for posting before lunch.. stupid mistake, you're right..

/Mikael

That's the real difference

[Sycraft-fu]

People often compare it to the war on drugs and they are right, to a point. So long as there's money, they'll always be those who try. However with drugs, people actively seek them out, they are willing to pay amazing amounts of money for them, and a single sale can result in a good amount of cash.

That's not the case with spam. People don't want it, in fact even most of those that buy from it hate it (they are just suckers). Also there aren't huge returns per spam, just a large volume of it.

So if the returns can be reduced and the penalites increased, it is likely the amount will decrease significantly. You'll never get rid of it, but you'll make it unattractive enough that it'll be fairly scarce.

Re:That's the real difference

[arivanov]

I beg to differ. The parent post has a point. If it will become more difficult for the SPAM to reach the targets it is quite likely that the SPAM will become more sophisticated and more vile. Just a few examples of where we can be heading:

• automated custom trojans which take advantage of the fact that a target to receive 99% of the cases will not be protected by an application firewall (fair assessment).
• custom phishing attacks that do a search in the person bookmarks first, before displaying the phish target. 99% of the population is lazy and bookmarks their bank login page so a well designed phishing/trojan or phishing/XSS attack can chose the correct target if it wants to. The only reason it is not being done now is that there are plenty of idiots out there to be caught via more trivial means.

I think that the hypothesis that SPAMmers will start to work on maximizing the return from a single mark instead of maximizing the number of marks they hit is not improbable. Spam is already a mostly criminal affair with a lot of it being run by organized crime.

thats AO-LUSERS

[cheekyboy]

thats AO-LUSERS matey.

MUGSHOT

[Anonymous Coward]

this picture is even more charming - mugshots.com

Whos dumb enough to buy from a spam ad?

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who buy things advertised for spam are the same people who voted for bush. Middle america is full of tools.

you bloody morons

[Anonymous Coward]

when are you gits gonna get a clue that you gotta make it too expensive for spammers to stay in business?

Instead of going all little miss muffet when you receive spam and run around fussing and whining like little girls, send a few replies to the spam.

The little bugger pays for bandwidth, pays for responses to his spam. the more response he gets the more he pays.

it's like sending back empty freepost/business reply envelopes and cards that come with those annoying mail adverts.

everyone responds even to spam sent to every invalid addy and it will bankrupt him. He'll be in barney with his service provider who will be in it so deep with their service provider, and so on and so on.

put a stop to it right quick it will.

so bloody obvious.

so are you all too smart to see the obvious? or are you all gonna keep pretending your useless and impotent spam blocking crap is a success?

Re:you bloody morons

[Anonymous Coward]

You bloody troll. Anytime you return an email to a spammer you can rest assured he will NEVER cancel you from his data base, because your address has been verified. Who thinks he's smart here?

Re:you bloody morons

[fireboy1919]

He knows that when your mailserver recieves the mail and doesn't send a "user doesn't exist" reply back.

So you might as well do as he suggests.

Re:you bloody morons

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you think they remove any addresses from their databases?

They do not care about bad addresses because they don't get the bounces.

What he seems to be saying is that since spammers pay for their bandwidth and for every hit or response to their spam it would hurt the spammer if every address they sent out returned a response. That includes the bad addresses. Especially the bad addresses.

Think a little about the concept and stop being so thin skinned.

What if every bit of spam to a bad address produced a few hits on their website without a purchase?

The spammer has to pay for the traffic plus the database is tainted with "confirmed" fake addresses which will be resold to other spammers, so the fun can start all over again.

It will hurt the spammer where it counts--the wallet. He will have to pay for those hits regardless of whether they produce anything.

It will also hurt the spamming service provider who sells services to the spammer.

That seems far more effective than filtering and blocking spam. It kills the source.

Re:Some more some:

[Anonymous Coward]

and maybe gets some companionship.
There's always someone looking for a new girlfriend.

Education is the key

[Jafar00]

If we want to really stop spam, putting spammers in jail is not the way to go. We really need to educate the poor suckers out there who actually buy this crap to stop. For example, I have been inundated with spams selling "Microsh*t" (asterisk added for family viewing) software. Am I led to believe that people have actually bought software from this guy thus encouraging him to continue spamming? Get some News coverage on it and tell people there are undercover piracy agents out there and that they shouldn't buy in case they are caught.
Likewise the good old v1@gra and c1alis or whatever. Does granny really understand that h@x0r speak and decide to buy dodgy fake drugs from an almost unreadable spam? I don't think so. For those things we need something like a 60 minutes expose that the oldies can watch and be shocked into not buying again.
Let get it into the news and out of our inboxes!

Theres one ass-rammer for the spammer every second

[MMercurius]

Meet Jeremy James, he's a spammer
A millionaire in orange pyjamas:
"Making money was fun
But it's all come undone, now I'm
Getting my ass-rammed in the slammer."

Re:It makes no difference.

[jacksonj04]

Use Bayesian filters. Take a look on SourceForge for ones such as POPfile(http://sourceforge.net/projects/popfile/) for platform independance and SpamBayes for Outlook/Outlook Express. These are end-user and as such can be tailored to the spam the user receives.

On the server side I know there are bayesian plugins for things such as SpamAssassin, although the names escape me now since I don't have to deal with them regularly.

For those who don't know, bayesian filtering is adaptive based on how often words and phrases appear in spam and non-spam.

We need to all chip in.

[TiggertheMad]

I think this would be a good time for all of /. to chip some money, and buy penis enlargement pills for his cell mate. I for one, would be statisfied with even a small increase in the girth of the sexual organ of whoever was giving his ass the sort of treatment that he gave the Internet on a daily basis.

Oh, yeah, and we also need to get his cell mate as much viagra as possible...

What I want to know is....

[Anonymous Coward]

... is anyone going to bother going after the service provider(s) that decided to peer with him?

That is to say, so okay, they caught HIM, but what about the [dozens of?] spam-friendly ISPs that accepted his 10-million-spams-per-day spew?? Who was it that sold him those 16 high-speed T1's, and thereafter immediately closed their eyes to what he was doing with them? That's what I want to know.

They're just as guilty as he is IMO.

Is "just spamming" a crime? or involves crime?

[hadaso]

> It doesn't apply a "fairly harsh penalty for spamming";
> it applies a fairly harsh penalty for fraud

What about spam that involves no kind of fraud?
Just sending several millions of messages and storing them in recipients email accounts mean that several recipients would lose email functionality (e.g., because the stored spam would push them over quota). Of course any single email sent can do that. The difference is that when I send an email message to a few recipients I know that it is highly unlikely that the particular message I send would cause that kind of damage. On the other hand, probability theory tells us that when a spammer sends out millions of messages, it is not just likely that it would cause several thousand recipients to be denied further use of email until they take action to clear that spam - it is close to certainty that this would happen. Much closer to certainty than the level of certainty courts require for sentencing a person to death.

When a spammer sends out a message to a list of millions of addresses, it is certain that it would damage a few thousands of the recipients. I wonder if this can be used to convict the spammer in court for doing that damage (to prove criminal intent).

There a re many other cases in which modern technology allows people to do things that on small scale are harmless, but on large case are harmful, and the extent of damage caused can be at least estimated in advance. I wonder hif and how criminal law can use this to convict spammers and others?

Re:Is "just spamming" a crime? or involves crime?

[MindStalker]

Currently we have the CAN-SPAM act. It reqires providing a reply address, and following through on removal list. So yes, if they follow the spam regulations and don't commit fraud, you can't prosecute them. But on the other hand, if they do, you generally can easily filter them, as well as have yourself removed from the list. The legitimate spammers also generally get their mail list from things that you sign up for and choose to have your email address shared. So its a matter of getting what you asked for, and free speach on the side of the spammer.

Re:Is "just spamming" a crime? or involves crime?

[hadaso]

> The legitimate spammers also generally get
> their mail list from things that you sign up
> for and choose to have your email address shared.

In this case it's not spam (though I might not know it was solcited if they don't provide the info as to the circumstances in which I agreed to receive their mail).

However, what I was thinking about when writing the grandfather post was not about the act of sending bulk mail by itself as being criminal, but rather the act of doing so despite knowing in advance that it would caertainly cause a certain amount of damage. In general, it seems to me that anyone performing some kind of operation should be responsible for the consequences of what they do, including the consequences of the "bulk" nature of the operation. So if the sending of millions of emails changes a certain risk factor from "unlikely" to "almost certain", it seems to me that the sender can be accused of knowingly causing that damage. It's not an argumant that has anything to do with sending email. it can be used with anything "bulk", i.e., any operation that is likely to cause something to happen on a "large scale".

I thought about this a few weeks ago, when on a radio in one Israeli radio station the phone number of a certain department in the Israeli ministry of treasury ws given to the public, and the public was asked to call and complain about a certain issue. Of course the number of calls made immediately after that made the phone line useless, so in fact it was a sort of a denial of service attack. It then discussed on all major Israeli news media because of the way that government office reacted: they automatically redirected all their phone conversations to the radio station that suggested calling them, so the DOS attack fired back! So then the media was mainly discussing the ethics of the government agency's response. There was quite a unanimous agreement that it is the rigth of the public to call and complain, and it is the right of the media to encourage the public to do so. But then I thought that there is another aspect to this: what mass media does when asking the public to do this has further consequences, because of the massive number of people they can reach. It is not the same as collecting signatures and sending them to that office, and it is not the same as people calling on their own time to complain. It is a coordinated effort, so perhaps the party that is coordinating this operation has a responsibility to think about the possible consequences of what they do in asking thousands of people to call the same place at the same time: i.e., the mere size of the operation changes the situation to one that carries more responsibility.

Re:Is "just spamming" a crime? or involves crime?

[JuggleGeek]

free speach on the side of the spammer.

The courts disagree. Spammers want to claim that spam is just "free speech", but it isn't.

Re:Is "just spamming" a crime? or involves crime?

[MindStalker]

No I mean if they meet the regulations them emailing you commercially is free speach, in the same way a commerical mailing in your mailbox is free speach. Not entirly free but they still have the right to speak it if its not fraudulant.

Re:Is "just spamming" a crime? or involves crime?

[JuggleGeek]

No I mean if they meet the regulations them emailing you commercially is free speach, in the same way a commerical mailing in your mailbox is free speach.

And, as I said before, you are wrong. Free speech doesn't mean that you can shove as many ads into my email box as you want - that's just what the spammers want people to think. (And it's spelled free speech by everyone but spammers. You spell it the spammer way.)

Free speech means you have the right to say essentially whatever you want. It does not give you the right to force people to listen. It does not give you the right to force other people to pay for your advertising. Telemarketers tried to argue that their "right" to call people is free speech, and therefore that it could not be regulated. They lost that argument. Fax spammers have also tried and lost.

They can have their speech by advertising via legitimate means. (TV, radio, newspapers, etc.) They can post whatever they want to a website. But if they are spamming, they are stealing other peoples bandwidth, forcing their advertising costs onto unwilling recipients. Your "legitimate spammers" can still ruin email as a communications medium, regardless of whether whatever crap they want to see is fraudulent or not.

You'll never understand this, though, so I'm wasting my time.

I doubt you'll care what judges have said, either, but lets look at what courts have ruled.

Chief Justice Berger, U.S. Supreme Court:

Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit. We categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even good ideas on an unwilling recipient. The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every persons domain.

U.S. Federal Judge Stanley Sporkin:

[Spammers] have come to court not because their freedom of speech is threatened but because their profits are; to dress up their complaints in First Amendment garb demeans the principles for which the First Amendment stands.

Re:Is "just spamming" a crime? or involves crime?

[MindStalker]

You'll never understand this, though, so I'm wasting my time.

I doubt you'll care what judges have said, either, but lets look at what courts have ruled.

Ouch dude! :)

Re:It makes no difference.

[lachlan76]

Since ISPs often have a spam filter in the service, that 'Click here to enable spam filter' button on their web site should be simple enough.

There is such a scam, and Americans fell for it...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called Bush.

Give Him The Death Penalty

[carlgt1]

The death penalty is overused in the US, and illegal pretty much anywhere except the Middle East & Asia, but the death penalty for spammers would be a good idea!

Similar to software

[pommiekiwifruit]

If you say, go to the shops and buy a CD-ROM of a PC game and when you take it home find out that it refuses to play on your PC since you have a different model of CD-ROM than the three that the "copy-protection" company tested it on, can you sue them? All those PC companies are still in business so obviously not. If you buy it in australia for example, they will charge you $1.95 per minute to ring up their technical support line, so putting bugs in their code is a profit center.

TV news: people who buy online diplomas

[peter303]

One of the news magazines last week had a piece about a goverment executive who bought a B.A., M.A., and PhD. on the web and was fired when she used these on a resume. She said she did all the work for these degrees and didnt know thye were phoney. Generally the work consisted of writing a resume of you "life experiences" and a term paper (which no faculty reads) about your degree and send in $7,000.

Apprentice shows that spamming works

[kzadot]

On last weeks apprentice, one team passed out flyers in the street, and the other team sent out email spam as part of marketing a briday shop. The spammers had queues, and ended earning 12 times as much profit. The non-spammers only sold 2 dresses and their shop was empty most of the day.

The lesson? Spam works.

Re:Apprentice shows that spamming works

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, what happened was that the winning team contracted with a popular website for brides-to-be called theknot.com; the members of the site provide their addresses for the express purpose of being contacted by vendors.

What the "Apprentice" team did wasn't spam, it was advertising targeted to a group of consumers who had specifically requested they be sent that kind of information.

cant used credit cards for online casinos

[peter303]

InterNet gambling (despite daytrading) is still banned in the US. And this supported by credit card companies refusing to remit payment to *known* casinos. (So they have to hide under false names until detected and put onthe do-not-pay list.)

Re:All that money

[relaxrelax]

"Well with 9 years in prison, all that money will probably be useful in bribing prison guards to protect him from some old-fashioned prison treatment" ...as some enlargement done with a penis instead of to a penis, and it works too? (-;

If the spammer is allowed to keep the money from the fraud, most/all of it, WHERE IS THE JUSTICE?

I should sell T-shirts: I got spammed and he got rich, but all I got was that enlargement revenge thing.

In response to the ass-rape glee

[Dusabre]

I find the many moderated comments concerning the spammers imminent ass-rape to be offensive.

Nobody deserves to be sexually abused. If you find torture exciting or a 'fitting' punishment, then you're a sadist.

Another thing to note is that he's not going to get gangbanged. Spamming is a non-violent crime. He'll get sent to a low-medium security prison.He's rich and that means he's protected in prison. All he has to do is pay the big man (if there is one at the country-club prison he goes to) a $100,000 a year and his ass will be protected 24/7/365. If there is no big man, he can buy himself a bodyguard or five.

And he'll get parole in 4 years unless he really misbehaves in prison.

He'll probably spend the next 4 years bored and wondering exactly how many ho's he'll bang and how many lines of coke he'll do, once he gets out. He'll probably be able to purchase both sex and drugs doing his time behind bars.

The law is making some progress!

[relaxrelax]

According to the article with the picture, he was convicted for using false (fraudulent) informations in E-mail headers.

If that's the case (journalists sometime 'make the facts more interesting' you know) then I'm all for that anti-spam law!

If spammers aren't allowed to forge headers, their business is inherently illegal or at least less profitable...

Re:Penis enlargement pills for fellow inmates

[relaxrelax]

...but is he praying the pills work, or praying the pills don't work? (-;

Re:How much is your freedom worth?-spam relief 4 U

[iamcf13]

Only email provider based filters really work at stopping spam because people who use individual filters wouldn't buy stuff anyway.

If you seriously want spam relief, visit my site.
I did which is why I use the freeware email checker I wrote to check my POP3 email accounts.
The shareware email mailserver I wrote there will reduce and/or keep spam out of your domains and computer networks while making the propagation of malware 'almost impossible'.

If you do not have anything constructive to say about this post, please do not reply to it. The advantages and disadvantages of my approach to spam filtering are spelled out in excrutiating detail there so that you can decide for yourself if my approach is right for you.

...a fairly harsh penalty...

[mnemotronic]

The significance of this case is that it applies a fairly harsh penalty for spamming.

I disagree. The penalty was not harsh. The guy is still alive, with all his body appendages intact. His family is still alive and unharmed. A harsh penalty would involve a lot of pain and suffering for this guy, his family, his dog, his cat, his stockbroker, his lawyer, his friends, his parents, their friends, and anyone even remotely connected by blood or marriage. The moral limits of a polite, tolerant, and forgiving society (the kind of limits which this guy marginalizes) don't permit harsh penalties, so there's really nothing to disuade this kind of person (and others) from employing technology to expropriate capital from the more gullible members of society.

You wanna stop spam? Get harsh.

On an ironic note...

[maysonl]

One of the Google sponsored links at the bottom of TFA page was to a site that seems to be running a scam very similar to the "Fedex refund processor" Jaynes was selling.