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 Category :: Spam |
Author :: Paul Judge, CTO, CipherTrust, Inc.  |
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| Article Title :: Spammer in the Slammer: Jeremy Jaynes Sentenced to Nine Years |
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Will other spammers take heed? Don’t count on it. Jeremy Jaynes
was on top of the world. By age 28, he owned a million-dollar
home, a high-class restaurant, a chain of gyms and countless
other toys. Yet those were only the spoils of his main line of
business, which was swindling innocent people out of their money
through email scams. From an unassuming house serving as his
company’s headquarters in Raleigh, NC, Jaynes sent an estimated
ten million messages a day pitching products most recipients
didn't want, amassing an estimated $24 million fortune in the
process. Using aliases such as Jeremy James and Gaven
Stubberfield, Jaynes spammed his way up to the #8 position on
Spamhaus’ Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) and grossed
as much as $750,000 a month, allowing him to live like a king.
However, Jaynes ran head-on into an information superhighway
road block when a Virginia judge sentenced him to nine years in
prison for his November 2004 conviction on felony charges of
using false IP addresses to send mass email advertisements (some
just call it spamming). The conviction was a landmark decision,
as Jaynes became the first person in the United States convicted
of felony spam charges. Though his operation was based in North
Carolina, Jaynes was tried in Virginia because it is home to a
large number of the routers that control much of North America's
Internet traffic (it’s also the home of AOL and a government
building or two).
He should’ve Used the Privacy Software During the trial,
prosecutors focused on three of Jaynes’ most egregious scams:
software that promised to protect users' private information; a
service for choosing penny stocks to invest in; and a
work-from-home "FedEx refund processor" opportunity that
promised $75-an-hour work but did little more than give buyers
access to a website of delinquent FedEx accounts. Sound
familiar? Anyone with an e-mail address has received countless
messages originating from Jaynes’ operation. (If you’re still
waiting on your privacy software to show up, it’s probably safe
to stop checking the mailbox.)
Jaynes got lists of millions of email addresses through a stolen
database of America Online customers. He also illegally obtained
e-mail addresses of eBay users. While the prosecutors still
don't know how Jaynes got access to the lists, the Associated
Press reported that the AOL names matched a list of 92 million
addresses that an AOL software engineer has been charged with
stealing.
When Jaynes’ operation was raided, investigators found that the
house from which he ran his operation was wired with 16 T-1
lines (a large office building can get by on a single T-1 line
for all its users). Investigators also entered into evidence
to-do lists handwritten by Jaynes. Take a look at Jeremy Jayne's
meticulously detailed lists at:
* www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes1.JPG *
www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes2.JPG *
www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes3.JPG
Good Work if You Can Get (Away With) It The economics of
spamming makes Jaynes’ decision to build a career of it
understandable, though not noble. Spammers work on the law of
averages, which would seem like an odd strategy considering that
the average response rate for a spam message is just one-tenth
of one percent. However, once you do the math even this
miniscule response rate can make one very wealthy very quickly.
If a spammer sends one million messages pushing a product width
a $40 profit, a response rate of 0.1 percent works out to 1000
customers, or $40,000 per million messages sent. Since each
message costs only fractions of a penny to send, and Jaynes was
sending literally billions of messages a year, it’s easy to see
how he pulled in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending
perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead.
The fact that spamming can be such a profitable undertaking
means that the profession is not likely to go anywhere in the
near future. Spammers have financial motivation to come up with
innovative ways to avoid detection, and they have begun to join
forces. While the landmark decision handed down in the Jaynes
trial may serve as a deterrent to some would-be spammers, it is
unlikely that the threat of prosecution will keep future
spammers from refining their trade. For now and the foreseeable
future, the answer still lies in technology, not law
enforcement.
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