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

[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: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...

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

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.

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?

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'.

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.

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.