Portrait of a Spammer   11/15/2004 - 1,371 views, 2 Comments

The recent Virginia trial of notorious mega-spammer Jeremy Jaynes has given the public a first rare look into the habitat and life of the wild spammer.

The thirty-year-old Jaynes, who also went by equally notorious aliases such as “Gaven Stubberfield”, started out as a slightly less (but only slightly) reviled form of high volume marketing material deployer: a direct mailer. Working out of his house, Jaynes appears to have made the transition from high volume direct mail deployer to high volume email deployer with relative ease.

While he made a name, of sorts, for himself in pornography spam, he actually hawked several lines, including advice on investing in penny stocks, software to remove private information from your computer, and the “Federal Express Refund Processing” scam, which was the most high profile of the activities discussed during the eight-day trial.

So there sat Jeremy Jaynes (along with, we are told, sister Jessica DeGroot and another accomplice who has since been acquitted), in his little un-noteworthy house in Raleigh, North Carolina, the picture of the quintessential small-time operator.

Except that he sat there commanding 16 high speed internet access lines, and spewing out 10 million (yes, you read that right - 10 million) pieces of spam a day.

And those 10 million pieces of spam a day yielded between 10,000 and 17,000 paying responses a month, and
an obscene $400,000 to $750,000 a month!

Jayne’s total expenses per month were estimated to be approximately $50,000, netting him a cool $350,000 to $700,000 a month in profit.

And they say that crime doesn’t pay.

Now let us take a moment to boggle over the fact that 10,000 to 17,000 people actually responded to his spam every month and responded by sending him money!

If ever you have wondered why it is so darned hard to get people to stop spamming, there is your answer.

As Virginia Assistant Attorney General Russell McGuire so succinctly put it, “When you’re marketing to the world, there are enough idiots out there.”

Indeed.