A 30 year old US man will get to celebrate his 40th birthday by leaving prison. He’s just been sentenced to 9 years for sending spam. Jeremy Jaynes was said to be the world’s 8th most prolific spammer. I hope they’re working right through the top 10.
You can read more on the story here thanks to BBC News.
The thing that amazes me is that he was estimated to earning around US$750 000 a month. That’s around a million dollars a month in Australian terms. Remember this is only one spammer so there must be huge amounts of money being lost to similar scammers everyday.
The guy was pushing porn and selling sham products and was able to extract huge amounts of money from a lot of unsuspecting people.
I wonder what kind of people get drawn in with spam scams. I guess you would have to list gullible people amongst some of the biggest consumers. Then there would be greedy people who see an offer that’s too good to be true and yet, because of their greed, still believe it and fork over the money.
The problem is that I would imagine most of those being caught would be those least able to afford it and those without the ability to do anything about it. I would think that many of those being ripped off would be from disadvantaged groups, the sort of people that should be protected, not preyed upon.
I’m glad that this one guy has been caught and dealt with and I hope that his sentence sends a message to others who would choose to prey upon the weak and vulnerable in our society.
Posted by Rodney Olsen
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Actually, it’s not hard to imagine this guy making that sort of money — when you consider that sending an e-mail is basically free and any decent computer programmer can make a robot capable of sending out thousands of spam e-mails every second.
Sadly, I don’t think he’s the only one. About the only possible way to deal with this problem that I can think of is to introduce a nominal charge for sending e-mails (say 5 cents per e-mail) which *might* then act as a deterrent to those who send out thousands of the damn things. Of course, the problem here would be making the charge apply across the thousands of ISP’s that are out there.