Friday, November 5

spammer in slammer for nine years

A North Carolina man, Jeremy Jaynes, got nine years in prison for spamming in violation of Virginia state anti-spam laws, Reuters reports. The report says he sent 100,000 in a 30-day period, and that he was the eighth most-prolific spammer in the world.

Those numbers don't seem to add up, though. I get about 20 spams a day at my work email, and the IT department here says they reject 95 percent of emails as spam before they even get to anyone's email account. Either the top seven spammers send out way more than Jaynes did, or the authorities don't really know much about the top spammers. (Or the reporter got the numbers wrong.)

If they did know who the top spammers are, why aren't they being busted too? Jaynes was prosecuted in Virginia because that's where the strong state law was, and because about half the world's internet traffic goes through massive servers in the state. So it seems any big-time spammer in the states could be prosecuted under Virginia's law.

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