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.

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 :-)

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.

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.

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.

Penis enlargement

[Magickcat]

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

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.