Criminal spammers guilty, get banged up

TWO NORTH Carolina folk became the first people in the nation to be convicted on felonious spamming charges.

A Loudoun County jury decided that Jeremy Jaynes, 30, and his sister Jessica DeGroot, 28 flooded tens of thousands of AOL email accounts with unsolicited email.

According to Associated Press, they were found guilty of three felony charges each for using bogus Internet addresses to send large volumes of e-mail ads through a Loudoun AOL server.

The jury recommended that Jaynes spend nine years in prison and that DeGroot pay $7,500 in fines for violating Virginia's anti-spam law.

Prosecutors depicted Jaynes as the kingpin of a spam operation but his brief maintained that the state had not proved that Jaynes sent emails to people who did not ask for them.

He also complained that the sentence was a little stiff too as people who commit robbery or other crimes of violence don't get nine years.

However, experts said yesterday that the convictions could embolden other prosecutors as they attempt to stop spammers. Jaynes, under the name Gaven Stubberfield, was Number eight on a list of the world's top ten spammers, compiled by anti spam outfit to Spamhaus.org. µ