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Convicted spammer sentenced to 9 years in jail
Posted on April 08, 2005

Jeremy Jaynes convicted in the nation's first felony prosecution for illegal spamming was sentenced to nine years in prison today, but the judge postponed the sentence while the case is appealed.

Judge Thomas D. Horne said that because the law targeting bulk e-mail distribution is new and raises constitutional questions, it was appropriate to defer the prison time until appeals courts rule, a process could take four years.

Jaynes, of the Raleigh area of North Carolina, will appeal on the grounds that he has been charged as an out-of-state resident under a Virginia law that has only just come into effect.

His sentence is the harshest punishment handed down so far for junk emailing in the US.

Number 8 on the ROKSO database (Register of Known Spam Operations), a worldwide spammer list, Jeremy Jaynes, aka "Gaven Stubberfield", notorious for "horsey porn" spam starring "Rambo," sent at least 10 million e-mails a day with the help of high-speed T1 lines and multiple machines pumping scam and porn spam around the clock. He was convicted in November for using false Internet addresses to send mass e-mail ads through an AOL server in Loudoun.

Under Virginia law, sending bulk email using fake addresses is a crime.

Jaynes has been free on $1 million bond since November. But under the conditions of his bond, he must live in Loudoun County, can rarely leave his home and must wear an electric monitor so officials can keep track of his whereabouts.

During the trial, prosecutors focused on three products that Jaynes hawked: software that promises to clean computers of private information; a service for choosing penny stocks to invest in; and a "FedEx refund processor" that promised $75-an-hour work. In a typical month, Jaynes might receive 10,000 to 17,000 credit card orders.

Prosecutors believe Jaynes had a net worth of up to $24 million.

Jaynes got lists of millions of e-mail addresses through a stolen database of America Online customers. He also illegally obtained e-mail addresses of Ebay users.

He provided bogus contact information and company names when registering for Web sites, making it almost impossible for recipients to track him down. He also falsified routing information within message headers and used software to generate phony domain names identifying the e-mail server used to send messages.

"It was not just sending bulk emails, he was falsifying the routing information, disguising the origin," said prosecutor Lisa Hicks Thomas. "The end user couldn't say: don't send this to me," she added.

Jaynes honed his techniques a decade ago as a distributor of regular, old-fashioned junk mail hawking a "mortgage refund processor," similar to the FedEx refund processor he pitched in his spam.
SOURCE: BBC; Washington Post; Spamhaus.org