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Spammer Sentenced to 9 Years in Jail
Iphtashu Fitz writes "Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, NC now has the dubious honor of being the first spammer sentenced to jail for the felony of spamming. Virginia judge Thomas Horne sentenced Jaynes to 9 years in prison based on a jury recommendation after he was convicted of sending out 10 million e-mails a day. Jaynes, who sent out much of his spam using the name "Gaven Stubberfield", has held a position on the SpamHaus Registry of Known Spam Operations for a long time.
Unfortunately the sentence has been postponed while the case is being appealed." Commentary on the sentence available at Forbes as well.
Did he defraud people with suger pills as well or something? 9 years in prison for annoying people seems a bit harsh...
It is VERY annoying though, and he did irritate millions.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
What kind of "status" would a spammer would get in jail? (For example, child abusers are the lowest form of life on the prison evolutionary scale.) And how it will affect their behavior after relase, and how it will affect the behavior of spammers who haven't been caught but may end up fearing what awaits.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
Not.
I think the greater point here is that he's being charged for crimes committed before they were crimes and which as many have pointed out are questionable as to if they should be considered crimes at all.
Yes, if you defraud or outright steal (think: hijacked zombie computers), sure, that should be criminal. If you merely annoy from the comfort of your home, using your hardware, that should be purely a civil matter for which you should suffer perhaps severe penalties, but not incarceration.
If I were the judge, I would get a bit creative and sentence the spammer to one second in jail for each generated spam e-mail.
Let them think on that for a while.... Heh.
(For those of you who are mathematically challenged, that would be approximately 11.5 days per 1 million email spam messages).
What kind of "status" would a spammer would get in jail? (For example, child abusers are the lowest form of life on the prison evolutionary scale)
You know, the myth of the rough justice karmic system in jail is highly disturbing: This seeming belief that federal prisoners are all bad people, but not bad bad, and they mete out justice to the truly bad people.
Child diddlers get killed in prison when it gets someone some fame, and maybe they dream that it'll get them some retribution in the good book. However the people doing the killing are rapists, murderers, extortionists - this is a merry band of robin hoods.
On the flip side the weak, and I'm talking to you 99% of Slashdot, are the ones that are having someone's cock jammed in their mouth/ass every night. The tacit approval of this system is scary, especially given that any of you could be wrongly convicted and tossed in jail. Haha, now you're getting ass fuck gang raped, and you have AIDS!
Love that prison karma!
This sounds a lot more reasonable. Almost no one has gotten in trouble for sending spam before, and then all the sudden this guy gets hit with by an out of state law and gets sentenced to 9 years. Too many people have this notion that once someone is found guilty of a crime, they are monsters that deserve no sympathy. 9 years is a long time to take from someone, and such a punishment should be reserved for more serious crimes. In terms of the deterent effect, well, most spammers went in thinking there was going to be no punishment. The vast majority of them will scamper away from this 'industry' if they realize they could go to jail for any amount of time. Sure, if you give the death penalty for spam, there will be a lot less spam, but having any sort of criminal punishment will go a long way. There is no need to be draconian.
You can see why getting into this business is so tempting... Nearly four hundred thousand dollars in one month. As long as people keep buying, spammers will keep spamming...
I don't agree. Spam is theft, pure and simple. It also can, and does, cause significant damage to ISP's, corporations, etc. As an admin who has been on the receiving end of huge floods of spam I know what a nightmare it can be. It can cause long mail outages, which can have a detrimental effect on a companies operations. It can saturate network links, which can result in higher costs for the users of that link. I haven't heard of any recent cases but there are companies that have been forced out of business because of the actions of spammers. (the whole flowers.com incident comes to mind)
In other words, the theft and damage caused by spammers can be huge. It may be spread out in tiny pieces over the accounts & servers of millions of individuals and companies, but it adds up to a huge amount.
If somebody stole $10,000,000 by hacking into a single bank should they be sent to jail any more or less than somebody who steals $1.00 from 10,000,000 unwitting internet users? What about the second, third, or 500th spammer? At what point will it take you to decide you don't want to keep paying $1.00 to each spammer that comes along?
Hell, to avoid this law you need only move out of Virginia.
Did you bother to RTFA? Spamking, there, is a resident of North Carolina. The statute says if the traffic passes through Virginia, the law applies. Some insane percentage (70%?) of internet traffic flows through northern Virginia (UUNet, Sprint, etc have backbones there), and the world's largest ISP is headquartered in Virginia.
You might also want to check out this article on Canada's CBC. This guy was making a half million a month doing this, and had assets of $24 million. This is the kind of money that is normally associated with narcotic trafficing. Perhaps the lengthy sentence is necessary as a deterrent.
There's a suit in the courts seeking to overhaul the entire justice system, based on the premise of cruel and unusual punishment. I'm not sure how it's going, frankly I hope they win.
Everyone in the Dept. of Corrections knows about the constant rape and torture of inmates, by inmates, and yet have done little to fix the problem in a century.
Sentencing someone to rape is cruel and unusual by any stretch of the term.
At any rate, prison makes bad people worse. There are dangers to society that need to be locked away, but the attitude of "throw everyone in for everything" is really warped. In my state, it's a manditory 10 years for being busted for anything drug related within 5 miles of a school. Get out a map of your city or town - unless you're way out on the farm, EVERYONE lives within 5 miles of a school. Erego, every college kid busted with a half a doobie gets his life ruined.
And then theres the practice of civil forfeiture, a great way to get around the constitutional protection to be able to refuse to testify against your spouse. "Mrs Malda, either you testify that Rob was selling crack to 6 year olds, or we take your home, car, all your money, and then put your kids into protective custody so you'll never see them again"
Cheer all you want about this, slashbots, this just sets a precedent for when you're in front of a Judge for downloading those Metallica mp3s. After all, a computer crime is computer crime to a clueless jury. Hell, the DMCA calls for even stiffer penalties than this, should you dare modify that PS2 to play copied titles.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This view of the worth of people in our society I think incites a cycle of degradation of our society. Some people commit crimes because they feel that no one gives a shit about them. And they're right, because most people will look at a total stranger without any empathy whatsoever.
"Oh, that man sent spam. I hate spam! Therefore I hate him!" Where is the logic in this reasoning? Because, people make this leap of judgement everyday.
Does anyone who becomes spammers, drug attics, prostitutes, etc. dream as kid that one day they will be those things? Probably not. No kid I have ever met wants those things. Most kids want to do great and noble things. Some of us lose that as we grow up, our experience in the world makes us feel that we somehow have a deficiency. That everyone is strangers and don't care - which comes back to the fact that is indeed true.
In conclusion to this, one of the most important things to note is there are no silver bullets. Hip-hop music and video games is not the root of all evil. But it is a sad day when most of the people in this world look at another human and assign value to his life based on the fact that they emailed spam.
/Soapbox
But then, why not charge him with fraud? After all, that's crime already exists.
Why charge him on spam alone? It's kind of like breaking a window to get into a house, robbing the people inside, and gunning them down, only to get charged with destruction of property.
If he is a fraudster, then he is a fraudster. Get him on that count, right?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
10M spams sent != 10M people annoyed. I'd be curious to know how many messages were...
actually sent to valid addresses to begin with?
dumped by relay-based filters (ORDB, etc)?
screened by off-the-shelf anti-spam/virus s/w?
screened by custom filters?
deleted without opening?
Sure, maybe 10M were sent, but I suspect a VERY small percentage actually made it to eyeballs. And of further interest: for the ones that actually did make it to eyeballs, what percentage of those viewers actually responded to the offer? Obviously, someone is out there responding to this crap if they keep sending it.
Criminals are not usually charged with crimes based on the number of bullets they fired at a victim; rather, they are charged with the results of the bullet[s] striking the victim. New crimes may include; attempted spam, involuntary spam-slaughter, accidental spam, self-defense through use of deadly spam, statatory spam.
Hmmm... statatory spam? Now that's interesting. What if your ad for pr0n makes it to a kid's in-box?
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
I did a piece a while back on average sentences. The statistics are mind-blowing.
# Rape (all types) (116 Days Average sentence)
# Nonnegligent Manslaughter (2.7 Years average sentence)
# Robbery (PHYSICALLY robbing a "brick and mortar" place) (46 days average sentence)
# Aggravated Assault (11 days average sentence)
# Larceny/Theft and Motor Vehicle Theft (2 days average)
That should kind of put this in perspective for you. NOTE this is time they served in prison. Data comes from 1995 if that helps any.
McD
People who are against human cloning must be bitter they are not good enough to be cloned.
I see a lot of people decrying the 9-year length of sentence as excessive. I'd like to promote the idea that its actually lenient, given the harm to society.
First, for those who haven't RTFA, this guy's crime wasn't just "spamming", it was the electronic equivalent of mail fraud. Take a look here for mail fraud penalties. Yup - that's right. Up to 5 YEARS per occurance. Not per person actually defrauded, but per mail sent.
Furthermore, we seem to want to punish "blue collar" crime (physical violence and theft) as somehow more heinous than "white collar" crime (usually fraud and theft of money or intangible property). As a poster above noted, blue collar crime tends to have a severe impact on a very limited number of people, though in the aggregate it also attacks a locality's social fabric (consider the number of violent crimes in someplace like South Central LA and the correlation to property values there). White collar crime, however, tends to impact a large number of people to a lesser extent, but also directly attacks the fundamental underpinnings of the society: in particular, the fundamental trust in fairness and shared responsibility that is essential for modern societies to function.
Fraud in particular is a particularly heinous crime from a societal standpoint, as it attacks the basic trust we put in financial transactions. A CEO giggering quarterly numbers is doing more than just cheating some stockholders out of a few cents in stock price - he's attacking the whole investing system which depends on truth in information dissemination. For if investors can't trust that a company's 10k annual report has real numbers, how can they invest?
White collar crime needs to be far more heavily punished than it currently is. And, it is much more deterred by increased prosecution and higher penalties than blue collar crime. Blue collar crime is generally only deterred by increased police presence (i.e. preventative measures) and not by increased penalties. White collar crime, on the other hand, generally shows a strong correlation to the likelihood of prosecution and severity of penalty. This is due to the fact that most white collar crime is committed by the more wealthy segment of the population, who generally do a risk analysis before committing the crime (i.e. "I'll steal $100,000 from the company, if I'm only 10% likely to get caught and only face 3 months in jail, but won't steal if I've a 50% chance of getting caught or if the sentence will be 5 years").
Also, remember that as "non-violent" criminals, white collar criminals tend to get put in low-security prisons, which cost much less to maintain than those in for violent crimes.
Overall, I'd like to see us start to put the emphasis on white collar crime instead of blue collar crime. In the big picture, I think it's far more damaging to society, and is far more frequent than people think.
There are some issues with this case (more specificly, the technicalities of the anti-spam law), but in the big picture, I think the sentence is exceedingly fair.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
When I lived in Malaysia, I would read the English language newspaper, and I always got a chuckle out of the crime section. "So-and-so was found guilty of whatever and sentenced to 6 strokes of the rotan." The rotan is a long, flexible wooden cane that they use to whip your ass with! I believe there is a similar punishment in Singapore.
The "rotan" would be an excellent punishment for spamming.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Hmm. I don't agree with that. Being put in prison should be punishment enough, without the HIV risk.
Still, it's interesting and amusing to wonder whether they'll have to keep him in solitary to keep him away from the nonces on account of the violence they'd do to him... :-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"You could commit a murder and probably get a similar sentence, if not shorter.
One murder deprives one person of 60 years. 10,000,000 spam deprive 10,000,000 people collectively of (for argument sake) 60 years. So, why is it more acceptable to harm many people a little? Or is it that the sentence is in line with murder because the collective harm is the same?
I'm tired of the "should someone go to jail for fraud" complaints when billions were stolen from millions of people (Enron, etc.). The harm is greater when you affect more people, not less. Yes, it is morally worse to kill someone violently than inconvenience many people at once (murder is a sin, bugging someone isn't), but the harm to society is the same, so I think that the punishment should be the same.
Learn to love Alaska
More to the point: Does Walmart print flyers that appear to originate from K-Mart -- send them by putting them in JC Penny's mailbox -- postage due -- pitching fraudulent products -- etc?..
I appreciate your attempt to get karma by cracking what you think is a joke, but prison rape is no joke. Part of the reason it occurs (and rape by my definition includes coercion as well as outright physical attacks, the coercive techniques are much more devious and dangerous as they are more likely to involve eventual prostitution and less likely to incur the authorities attention) is that there are: 1. Large numbers of men in close quarters with no sexual outlet. This has obvious ramificaitons, especally when the population is young and testosterone laden. 2. Large populations of people with nothing to lose: life sentences mean there is no hope of good treatment, and if one is the top of the food chain size wise and not fearful of others in fights etc. then predatory behavior will result. 3. Lack of genuine conjugal visits. This fosters the dissolusionment of the family bond, already weakened by moving of the prisoner far from his home. If the prisoner ever has any hope of being released, this increases his likelihood of recidivism greatly. Prison is no joke, and prison rape is especally no joke. Lest you think I'm overblowing the problem, the majority of prisons in this country are "minimum" security (but due to overcrowding there are individuals incarcerated in these with life sentences) These places tend not to have the overt physical rapes, but the insidious coercive type is rampant, with the wink wink, nudge nudge of the 'corrections officers' Stop prison rape now
Depends upon the nature of his emails, I'd say.
If they're only annoying because of quantity, but otherwise legitimate services, then I'd agree that jail does seem a dangerous path to be going down. I don't subscribe to jail being a good deterrent for minor offences.
OTOH, if the mails he were sending were badly fraudulent or dangerous, i.e. dodgy mortages, fake viagra (who knows what's in it?), credit card fraud, 419 scams etc then I think jailtime is deserved.
If someone defrauds a lot of people of a lot of real money (as opposed to the theoretical loss that RIAA et al use - $15,000 a track is rediculous) then jailtime is just. The bigger the fraud, the longer the sentence should be.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.