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Spammer Gets Nine Years

By Jeralyn, Section Crime in the News
Posted on Sat Apr 09, 2005 at 10:42:45 AM EST
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In our continuing "America. Prison Nation" series: A 30 year old spammer named Jeremy Jaynes from North Carolina has been sentenced to nine years by a Virginia jury.

Nine years? As Xoverboard points out, what is he, the most dangerous man in America? You don't get that much time for manslaughter or child molestation in a lot of places.

At least the judge has allowed him to remain on bond pending the appeal, citing serious constitutional issues with the law, not the least of which is that is seeks to regulate activity outside of Virginia:

[Loudoun County Circuit Judge Thomas Horne] said he might also reconsider the sentence if Jaynes loses the appeal. "I do not believe a person should go to prison for a law that is invalid," he said. "There are substantial legal issues that need to be brought before the appellate court."

No one likes spammers, but this is excessive.

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    Spammer Gets Nine Years | 12 comments (12 topical)
    Re: Spammer Gets Nine Years (none / 0) (#1)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sat Apr 09, 2005 at 11:48:35 AM EST
    He'll have plenty of time to read each and every one of those spam e-mails. Hey that should be part of every spammers sentence!

    Re: Spammer Gets Nine Years (none / 0) (#2)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sat Apr 09, 2005 at 12:24:08 PM EST
    He should have to give up any money he made as a result of spamming as compensatory damages, and pay some punitive damages on top of that. Jail time should not even be in the picture unless there was credit card fraud or some other criminal activity.

    Re: Spammer Gets Nine Years (none / 0) (#3)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sat Apr 09, 2005 at 01:38:21 PM EST
    How ridiculous. I used to be a prosecutor, and have seen people get much less time for far more serious acts.

    Re: Spammer Gets Nine Years (none / 0) (#4)
    by Johnny on Sat Apr 09, 2005 at 02:08:47 PM EST
    THis is absolutely insane... 9 years. Want to make a bet he comes out just happy and sorry he ever committed such a grievous offense? He will be reformed. (Sarcasm intended) Here's a hint people-use filters.

    Re: Spammer Gets Nine Years (none / 0) (#5)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sat Apr 09, 2005 at 05:55:17 PM EST
    Is this a joke? it can't be? and if he gets 9 years, can you be next? it looks like one more government setup against our laws/rights and the rule of laws that mean something, prison is not a nice place and i think many of us will be seeing it first hand for non crimes, next move the government will be putting people in prison for watching tv or eating to much or saying something it does not want to hear, or wants you to know.

    Re: Spammer Gets Nine Years (none / 0) (#6)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sat Apr 09, 2005 at 06:38:33 PM EST
    To be truthful ... on a visceral level, I want to throw him in prison for a few decades or more. But, yeah, it's probably excessive. If you ask me, a high fine is probably moe appropriate than jail time. --|PW|--

    Re: Spammer Gets Nine Years (none / 0) (#8)
    by Johnny on Sun Apr 10, 2005 at 01:19:44 AM EST
    Who cares how much he made? The Enron and Worldcom dudes made just as much, being just as deceiving and devilish... See them getting sentenced to 9 years?

    Re: Spammer Gets Nine Years (none / 0) (#9)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sun Apr 10, 2005 at 06:54:33 AM EST
    To be honest, it's not all that stiff from my viewpoint. That's because to me, spammers aren't just a nuisance - they're thieves, stealing both common property and potentially my own property to enrich themselves. Imagine this: in order to drive to and from work each day, you find yourself in heavy traffic on a regular basis. After a while, you notice that a large number of the cars that are on the road at those times have written on them the names of courier services and door-to-door sales companies. Intrigued, you start looking these companies up, and you find that the people they travel to don't want what these companies are delivering, and often are just dismissed summarily. But the companies continue to send them out, because they've found that it's so cheap to send them out, seeing as the roads are publically owned and such - it's not hurting them. (Of course, it's hurting YOU, making commuting a nightmare.) That, in a nutshell, is the situation with spammers - they are literally stealing limited bandwidth to enrich themselves, and crippling the Internet in the process. And we're not talking small potatoes either - analysts have said that spammers eat up $500M of bandwidth (bandwidth, btw, that is owned by other people either commonly or by specific organizations) per year and can devour up to 80% of available capacity at times. And no, filters aren't a solution - the problem is the traffic on the lines, which filters do little to help fix. Maybe nine years is too much time. But the last time I checked, thieves get put into jail - and these folks are very much thieves.

    Re: Spammer Gets Nine Years (none / 0) (#10)
    by Johnny on Sun Apr 10, 2005 at 10:15:38 AM EST
    Yes filters will help. Much spam is generated by those who actually open the damn things, it sends a message back that says "This guy is dumb enough to read a piece of spam!" Much spam is generated by people signing up willy-nilly on the net for anything they see. "Please provide your name and email addy and get a FREE I-POD!" I guarantee that spam will not decrease because of this, much like the CAN-SPAM act, it will mean absolutely nothing to anyone. Filter it out, and contact your ISP to start blocking it at their servers. If they do not offer a spa blocking program, consider changing. And do not use AOL or any of the big guys... And do not worry about bandwidth, there really is enough to go around.

    Re: Spammer Gets Nine Years (none / 0) (#11)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sun Apr 10, 2005 at 10:31:11 AM EST
    It strikes me that it is hard to deal with criminal acts like this. If I introduce a poison that reduces the life-span of everybody by 10 second, is that the same as murder? If I rig a computer to steal $1 from every person in the country? When the cost of a crime is distributed across millions of people, its cost can seem small when it is, in fact, huge. That's partly because we don't really realize how many people "millions of people" is.

    Re: Spammer Gets Nine Years (none / 0) (#12)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sun Apr 10, 2005 at 10:37:04 AM EST
    He was sending out 50 million emails a day. Over a single month, that's 1.5 billion emails, so he was sentenced to one second for every 5 emails. Doesn't seem to harsh.

    Re: Spammer Gets Nine Years (none / 0) (#13)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sun Apr 24, 2005 at 12:29:58 PM EST
    I'm sorry but 9 years in this case is ridiculous! Yes i get frustrated with spam e-mail too, but one reader put spam on the same list as spyware and i just hope that this reader knows the difference here!! A spam e-mail does nothing other than offer you a service or merchandise, it is YOUR choice to open this e-mail or not. (the whole bandwith thing sounded far fetched to me, although it might be true). A creator of spyware though is something totally different, now we are talking about invation of your property wjere the purp litterally gains access to information on your hard drive and there is nothing you can do about it (other than get the protection and clean-up programs to deal with these threats). Now a lot of these spy-ware programmers are young pimple-faced power-hungry teenagers that has no other way of showing and feeling like they have power. These teenagers are to young to be prosecuted and to get punished for this and its to bad that we can not control this annoying pest. Bottonline: To throw somebody behind bars for 9 years for spamming is absolutely crazy, and we should concentrate our efforts on far worse internet criminal behavior.

    Spammer Gets Nine Years | 12 comments (12 topical)