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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.'"
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?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
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...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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
This article will just encourage people to make a living spamming with that much potential money.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
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?
Some additional details, including a charming picture, are available in his hometown paper:
1 41513c.html
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1828341p-8
Yes - they were T1 lines.
$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...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
$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
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?
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.
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.
/. 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.
Now there's been stories on
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.
I haven't had any problem with spam for years.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
...but no one else seems to agree with me that convicted email spammers should be slowly tortured to death.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
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?
--
make install -not war
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.
I bet he's now praying that none of his fellow inmates have purchased penis enlargement pills.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
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.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Remember, though, lots of people aren't smart enough to set up good filters or even to ignore spam. (most people use IE).
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
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.
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.
Tag lost or not installed.
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.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
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.
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
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
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!
http://saveie6.com/
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...
You must think in Russian.
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
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
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.
Tag lost or not installed.
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.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
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.
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.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
That is a nonsensical argument. If it were conducted via normal paper-based mail, the volume wouldn't be anywhere near as high.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
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.
"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.
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.
.edu?
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
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.
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'.
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.
I have little to say, but even less to lose by saying it.
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 :)
feh. stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
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.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
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.
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.
His name is Robert Paulsen...
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.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
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.
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!
RebateFX.com - Spread rebates for Forex traders
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.
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.