Spammer Goes to the Can

There’s a guy from North Carolina called Jeremy Jaynes.  He is one of the kings of spam, listed as #8 in the world for sending out the most junk e-mail messages. 

Jeremy was selling fake products and (the classic Internet money-maker) pornography.  He and his sister were involved in the business. 

It seems that he was routing his e-mail through AOL servers in Virginia.  Oops!  Virginia has a pretty mean anti-spam law that makes hiding the sender’s e-mail address a crime. The volume of e-mail that Jaynes sent made his spamming a felony.

He was charged in Virginia and convicted.  He has been sentenced to nine years in the slammer. 

While such news makes me whoop for joy, the devil’s in the details, as they say.  Jeremy’s only 30, so he’s got a few years to spare in the brig.  It seems also that that he was making about US$500,000 per month and has US$24,000,000 in assets. 

There was no mention of the state going after those assets, so I suppose that he is going to be able to keep them.  Even invested conservatively, he should be earning well over a million a year in interest alone. 

Would you go to jail for nine years if you could come out having US$35,000,000 waiting for you?  I’ll tell you, if I was single and didn’t have family commitments, I’d have to think about it. 

I don’t know about you, but I get 15-20 spam messages almost daily.  I takes my time to get rid of them, I spend money trying to configure my system to block it and it’s really, REALLY annoying. 

(What is also worrying is that I get at least one “Nigerian Letter” scam e-mail every day.  It amazes me that, even a decade later, that scam still works.)

I say that we enact a law that makes it an automatic penalty of $500 for every spam you send.  On top of that, the penalty goes to the recipient.  As a spam recipient, all you have to do is prove that the e-mail was unsolicited and where it came from and BLAM! – the spammer owes you $500.  That might start to deter these people.

There are some states that have that kind of law already for junk mail and telemarketing.  If, after asking the marketer not to contact you, they do it again, you  get $500.  There are some people who make a living going after these companies.

The other thing that strikes me is that this case, once again, shows the great disparity in criminal sentencing between Canada and the U.S.  We give Karla Homolka 12 years for at least 2 murders and Jaynes gets 9 for spamming. 

I don’t know if spamming is a crime in Canada.  Even if it was, what kind of punishment would it bring?  Given the general disparity in sentencing, 9 years for spamming in the US would translate into a few months here.