[wordup] spammer gets 1 in 30,000 response rate ....

[Adam Shand]

... yet still could pull in US$400,000 - US$750,000 per month.  yeeesh 
....

From: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/INSIDE_SPAMMING

Nov 14, 8:45 PM EST
Trial Shows How Spammers Operate

By MATTHEW BARAKAT
AP Business Writer

LEESBURG, Va. (AP) -- As one of the world's most prolific spammers, 
Jeremy Jaynes pumped out at least 10 million e-mails a day with the 
help of 16 high-speed lines, the kind of Internet capacity a 
1,000-employee company would need.

Jaynes' business was remarkably lucrative; prosecutors say he grossed 
up to $750,000 per month. If you have an e-mail account, chances are 
Jaynes tried to get your attention, pitching software, pornography and 
work-at-home schemes.

The eight-day trial that ended in his conviction this month shed light 
on the operations of a 30-year-old former purveyor of physical junk 
mail who worked with minimal assistance out of a nondescript house in 
Raleigh, N.C.

A state jury in Leesburg has recommended a nine-year prison term in the 
nation's first felony trial of spam purveyors. Sentencing is set for 
February.

During the trial, prosecutors focused on three products that Jaynes 
hawked: software that promises to clean computers of private 
information; a service for choosing penny stocks to invest in; and a 
"FedEx refund processor" that promised $75-an-hour work but did little 
more than give buyers access to a Web site of delinquent FedEx 
accounts.

Jaynes, going by Gaven Stubberfield and other aliases, had established 
a niche as a pornography purveyor, said Assistant Attorney General 
Russell McGuire, who prosecuted the case. But Jaynes was constantly 
tweaking and rotating products.

Relatively few people actually responded to Jaynes' pitches. In a 
typical month, prosecutors said during the trial, Jaynes might receive 
10,000 to 17,000 credit card orders, thus making money on perhaps only 
one of every 30,000 e-mails he sent out.

But he earned $40 a pop, and the undertaking was so vast that Jaynes 
could still pull in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending 
perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead, McGuire said.

"When you're marketing to the world, there are enough idiots out there" 
who will be suckered in, McGuire said in an interview.

Prosecutors believe Jaynes had a net worth of up to $24 million, and 
they described one of his homes as a mansion, though the e-mail came 
from a house described as average.

Jaynes got lists of e-mail addresses - millions of them - through a 
stolen database of America Online customers. He also illegally obtained 
e-mail addresses of users of the online auction site eBay.

Prosecutors don't know how he got the lists, though McGuire said the 
AOL names matched a list of 92 million addresses an AOL software 
engineer has been charged with stealing. However Jaynes got them, they 
were particularly valuable because AOL customers and eBay users by 
their very nature have already shown a willingness to engage in 
e-commerce.

Under Virginia law, like a federal anti-spam measure that took effect 
months later, sending out commercial pitches, even on a massive scale, 
is not itself illegal. The e-mail must be unsolicited and contain false 
information as to its origin or transmission.

Jaynes did that in several ways.

He provided bogus contact information and company names when 
registering for Web sites, making it almost impossible for recipients 
to track him down. He also falsified routing information within message 
headers and used software to generate phony domain names identifying 
the e-mail server used to send messages.

"He would do that to circumvent the spam filters," said Lisa 
Hicks-Thomas, section chief for the Virginia attorney general's 
computer crimes unit.

Jaynes honed his techniques a decade ago as a distributor of regular, 
old-fashioned junk mail hawking a "mortgage refund processor," similar 
to the FedEx refund processor he pitched in his spam, McGuire said.

But the ability to set up shop in cyberspace allowed Jaynes to take his 
fraud to a whole new level, McGuire said.

A videotape prosecutors were barred from showing at trial shows Jaynes 
sitting amid his array of computer equipment, bragging about sitting at 
"spam headquarters." It appears, though, that Jaynes was sending out 
e-mails 24 hours a day, so he could frequently leave those headquarters 
unstaffed.

And it appears he had little assistance.

Jaynes' sister, Jessica DeGroot, was convicted of identical charges but 
given no jail time. A third defendant was acquitted.

Prosecutors would not discuss the investigative techniques that led to 
Jaynes' capture. But John Levine, author of "The Internet for Dummies" 
and an expert witness for the prosecution in Jaynes' trial, said Jaynes 
was relatively unsophisticated compared to spammers who use "zombie 
servers" in foreign countries - akin to "e-mail laundering" - to hide 
the e-mail's true origin. Such zombies are often innocent Internet 
users whose computers, through a virus or other malicious code, become 
relays for spam.

"I was surprised at how simple his operation was," Levine said. "If he 
were more clever, it would have been much harder to catch him."

Jaynes' defense attorney, David Oblon, never disputed that his client 
was a bulk e-mail distributor. But he argued that the law was poorly 
crafted and that prosecutors never proved the e-mail was unsolicited. 
He also argued before the trial that the law is an unconstitutional 
infringement of free speech.

Jaynes can raise the free-speech issue on appeal, and Oblon said both 
he and Jaynes are confident the conviction will eventually be 
overturned. Oblon also took issue with the recommended nine-year 
sentence, calling it exceptionally harsh.

Virginia is investigating similar cases, and McGuire said a lengthy 
sentence would serve as a deterrent - not only in Virginia, where 
prosecutors brought the case given that AOL's headquarters is there.