quote:

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May 28, 8:23 AM (ET)

By CAROLYN THOMPSON

(AP) Howard Carmack is escorted from the courtroom after being sentenced to 3 1/2 to 7 years in prison...


BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) - A man who sent 850 million junk e-mails through accounts he opened with stolen identities was sentenced to up to seven years in prison on Thursday.

Atlanta-based Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. said it hoped the sentence and an earlier $16.4 million civil judgment against Howard Carmack will deter other spammers.

"Before spammers send one more spam e-mail, we think they should remember that what happened to Howard Carmack can happen to them," said Karen Casion, Earthlink's assistant general counsel.

Jurors sentenced Carmack to seven years for convictions in March of forgery, identity theft and falsifying business records. He must serve a minimum 3 1/2 years.

Earthlink said Carmack ran 343 illegal e-mail accounts under false names from 2002 until his arrest last May, using them to send unsolicited e-mail ads for things like get-rich-quick schemes and sexual enhancers.

Carmack told the judge he believed the case against him was overblown, saying there were no victims. "I obviously regret this whole involvement," he said.

Carmack was convicted of defrauding EarthLink and eight men from New York, Ohio and Washington, D.C. Last May, the company won a $16.4 million civil judgment against Carmack.

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Posted by Jeremy Fuentes (Member # 2135) on 05-28-2004, 12:20 PM:
 
HAHAHAHA!!!
 

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Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 05-28-2004, 12:26 PM:
 
I'm sure the guy is "judgement proof", i.e. doesn't have the money to pay off that civil award. This is the next best thing. I love it!

Heh heh, looks like someone's going to get a nice plump wife for the next couple of years at the local Gray Bar Hilton...
 

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Posted by Tim Reed (Member # 137) on 05-28-2004, 12:31 PM:
 
Yeah! And with a line on free Viagra samples, too, no doubt!

 

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Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 05-28-2004, 12:46 PM:
 
I'm playing a song to celebrate!

Frank Zappa -- "Dong Work for Yuda" -- Joe's Garage: Volume 2

Don't-a bend-a over if you are smart!
 

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Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 05-28-2004, 02:28 PM:
 
Ummm... this guy just HAPPENED to be a spammer. He is not going to jail for sending tons of spam. He is going to jail for identity theft, forgery, and falsification of business records. You can't arrest a spammer just for spamming unless you catch them doing something else that we actually have real laws for.
[av=d]

Spammers are stupid people, so maybe this will scare a few of them.
 

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Posted by Tim Reed (Member # 137) on 05-28-2004, 03:25 PM:
 
GEEZ! What's going on with the server today?
 

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Posted by Tim Reed (Member # 137) on 05-28-2004, 03:26 PM:
 
Geez!
 

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Posted by Tim Reed (Member # 137) on 05-28-2004, 03:27 PM:
 
I noticed that before I posted it, I was just quoting the headline. Evidently, they don't allow anonymous email accounts, but the result is the same: they canned a spammer.
 

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Posted by Andy Muirhead (Member # 712) on 05-28-2004, 08:20 PM:
 
I hate spam. I spend about 2 minutes every day deleting spam from my email account.

Do I want the spammers sent to prison?

No.

Don't be fucking ridiculous. And it is, very.

Yeah, it is a pain in the arse. And spam is annoying and inconvient. But, honestly, Prison?
 

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Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 05-28-2004, 09:04 PM:
 
"And spam is annoying and inconvient. But, honestly, Prison? "
No you are absolutly right no not prison just the gallows and be done with it
 

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Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 05-29-2004, 01:23 AM:
 
Prison or death. I'm fine with either, just so long as spammers get one or the other.
 

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Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 05-29-2004, 01:55 AM:
 
As a vegetarian, I think SPAM is bad and the Hormel executives and all their employees should skip jail and just rot in hell.

>>> Phil
 

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Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 05-29-2004, 02:01 AM:
 
Looks like Tim is spamming this thread with a bunch o' posts![av=l]
 

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 04-09-2005, 09:23 AM:
 
Spammer jailed for nine years - BBC Online story

quote:

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A man has been sentenced to nine years in jail by a Virginia judge for sending millions of junk emails, or "spamming". Jeremy Jaynes, 30, is the first person in the US to get a prison term in a spam case. He is said to have been the world's eighth most prolific spammer.

By selling sham products and services advertised in his messages, he earned up to $750,000 (£398,000) per month. Jaynes has appealed, and the court has put off the start of his prison term because the new law raises questions. Under Virginia law, sending bulk email using fake addresses is a crime.

"It was not just sending bulk emails, he was falsifying the routing information, disguising the origin," said prosecutor Lisa Hicks Thomas. "The end user couldn't say: don't send this to me," she added. Ms Thomas said she was pleased with the ruling and hoped it would be upheld.

Jaynes was operating though an America Online (AOL) server in Loudoun County, where the world's largest Internet services provider is based, and is believed to have sent some 10m unwanted emails a day. Products advertised in his emails included a "Fed-Ex refund processor" which he claimed would have allowed people to earn $75 an hour by working from home.

Jaynes, who is from North Carolina, will appeal on the grounds that he has been charged as an out-of-state resident under a Virginia law that has only just come into effect. His sentence is the harshest punishment handed down so far for junk emailing in the US, and appears to be a strong signal that authorities will not tolerate the spamming business.

Jaynes has pledged that regardless of the final outcome of his trial, he will never again be involved in what he called the "email marketing business". It is believed that 70% of all emails are spam.

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Full marks to the BBC journalist's research skills, though: Jaynes clearly was not the first person in the US to be jailed for spamming, as claimed in the opening paragraph. As even a Google search would have revealed the Carmack conviction which started this thread, I'm not very impressed with that.
 

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Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 04-09-2005, 10:47 AM:
 
I love it. Here's to the "spam" those two will be taking in their "outboxes" in jail every day for the next several years:

"You've got male."


 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 04-09-2005, 01:18 PM:
 
Spamming would not be such a problem if Internet Service Providers would auto-delete any malware-infected e-mail that visits their servers.

A great deal of the "bot" or "zombie" computers vomiting out spam are those from people too cheap, too lazy (or both) to buy any anti-virus software and run other security measures on their machines. If all their e-mail was getting auto-deleted as soon as it left their machine, then they might do something about fixing the problem. Still, the big part of the responsibility lies with the ISPs and how they govern their mail servers.

It also doesn't help that the US Congress is a whore to the direct marketing industry. Lobbyists convinced those guys to create a spam-friendly "can spam act" law that is pretty much nothing more than a "you can spam" law. The act blocked effective caller ID for e-mail technologies being developed by Yahoo, Microsoft and others. Still, the ever growing tide of spam may force ISPs, NAPs and other parts of the Internet to adopt new methods for sending and receiving e-mail where it is much harder or even impossible for criminals to falsify headers.
 

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Posted by Mark J. Marshall (Member # 1409) on 04-09-2005, 10:36 PM:
 
We use Mailsweeper to scan for incoming spam. One thing it does is a reverse DNS lookup. So, when an email "server" connects to us, if there's no DNS record for that IP address, our server drops the connection immediately. Conveniently, the amount of spam making it into the system here dropped probably eighty five percent.

One thing that would be helpful for them to add to Mailsweeper is a "Spell Check" on the subject line. If email comes in with "V1a.grA" in the subject.... since it fails a spell check... DELETE. Have a nice day. (Actually, you'd want to put it into quarantine to see if it's real mail or not.)

I don't want anyone who can't spell emailing me anyway.
 

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Posted by John Walsh (Member # 168) on 04-10-2005, 12:12 PM:
 
While I'm glad these spammers got arrested, I agree with Joe: they are only being charges with some 'other' crime. And Bobby is right in that Congress won't do anything, and (I will add) neither will ISP's. AOL didn't know someone was sending 10 million e-mails a day, even if it was spread out over several user accounts? Bite me!

Abby Hoffman once suggested that, whenever a politician says; "... I promise to ..." in a speech, that everyone go and flush the toilet, messing things up so no one dare do it again. We need to do the same whenever Congress votes to allow spammers to continue. 'Ping day' or whatever.
 

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