Spammer bail set at $1M

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Steven Champeon <schampeo () hesketh com>
Date: November 9, 2004 1:56:04 PM EST
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: lauren () vortex com
Subject: Re: [IP] Spammer bail set at $1M

on Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 12:31:29PM -0500, David Farber wrote:
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com>
> Date: November 9, 2004 10:46:35 AM EST
> To: dave () farber net
> Cc: lauren () vortex com
> Subject: Spammer bail set at $1M
>
> Dave,
>
> As much as we all hate spam, there is something disquieting about
> this story.  A nine year sentence for sending spam -- paraded around
> in shackles?  The Virginia anti-spam law in question is indeed
> questionable, and such state-based prosecution theories could one
> day come back to haunt a wide variety of non-spammers as well.  It's
> easy to point at an egregious case and to score prosecutorial points
> by throwing the book at him, but with so much blood, death, and
> serious crimes around the world at the moment, at the hands of
> individuals and institutions, one can't help but wonder if
> proportionality is becoming a completely forgotten concept.

I'm also from Raleigh, NC, just like Mr. Jaynes.

I make my living as a Web applications consultant, writer, editor, and
all-around "Web guru". I co-own my company, which employs 7 people. I've
spoken at Web-related conferences and served on the advisory boards of
both the CMP and SxSW Interactive conferences. I support community
efforts such as the Web Standards Project, a grassroots effort to raise
the bar on standards support in browsers, and the webdesign-l mailing
list, 7 years old and 2200 members strong. In short, I'm pretty deeply
ensconced in Web and Internet technologies, and that's what I should be
doing with my time.

Instead, for the past two years, roughly, starting in earnest in May of
last year, but stretching out to at least 1997, I've spent an increasing
amount of my time just dealing with spam, viruses, and abusive activity.

65% of the inbound mail we get here is now rejected as spam or viruses.

I spend at least two hours a day maintaining my filters, on two servers,
so that my customers and employees can use email; email is our primary
means of communicating with our clients. I've put over two thousand
hours into building custom sendmail rulesets and databases so that I can
protect my systems against rampant abuses from unprotected and
compromised Windows systems, because they account for 40% of the spam
sources (here, anyway - YMMV) and because ISPs won't do anything about
them. I am just one of hundreds of thousands, and I've wasted an insane
amount of time dealing with these miscreants. So I'm not likely to look
fondly on spammers as small time operators, or compare them favorably
with terrorists, etc. It's pretty well known that there are botnets
being run and sold by the Russian mob; estimates suggest that there are
possibly hundreds of millions of compromised hosts out there. This is
not your circa 1993 small-time spam operation.

Jeremy Jaynes, or, as we like to call him, Gaven Stubberfield, was an
AT&T customer at one point, and so soiled the IP netblock assigned to
him through spamming, abuse, and other behavior, that it was listed
(along with many others) at SPEWS, an anonymous blacklist with fairly
extreme policies - not content to go after just the spammers, the SPEWS
folks reason that if they weren't supported by ISPs that spammers would
not be on the Internet. To a point, I agree. But this is neither here
nor there. The bottom line is that the netblock was listed as having
been associated with a spammer, and AT&T for having continued to provide
service to him even after copious evidence was presented of his guilt.

One of our clients, Oxford University Press, was assigned a netblock by
AT&T that had formerly been occupied by Gaven/Jeremy (12.107.204.0/23).
It quickly became clear that many people were using the SPEWS list to
filter mail; in the end, I think it took OUP over a month to get things
straight again so that their mail was being accepted. I have no idea how
many man hours they lost due to the fouled netspace they were issued.

 http://spews.org/html/S359.html

Some may blame SPEWS, for listing a netblock that Jaynes had apparently
vacated. Some may blame the admins who used SPEWS to block their mail.
Some may blame AT&T for providing hosting to a spammer.

I blame Mr. Jaynes. And I'm very happy to see that he's finally been
found guilty of the abuse and crimes he's committed, and hope that he
learns that theft of service is not a basis for a "business".

And that's without even considering that he was essentially defrauding
tens of thousands of gullible people; he bilked them for over 24 million
dollars. No wonder he quit running Vinnie's Restaurant. He owns two
houses in Raleigh; one he paid over a million dollars for. This for his
tireless efforts to destroy email, defraud the gullible, and leave such
a tainted wake that legitimate businesses can't even use netspace he
used to occupy without it costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Nine years? That *might* be appropriate. But when he gets out, he'll
still have two houses in my town, paid for with the money he stole from
gullible AOL users, and I think that's ridiculous.

And he's just one spammer. I spent two months dealing with "backscatter"
- bounces from badly configured mail servers to forged addresses - from
a "joe job" run against one of our domains by Brian Westby. The FTC
filed a suit against him back in April of last year; the joe job stopped
the next day. In the end, he was fined $112K. As far as I can tell, from
various posts in NANAS, he's back spamming again. Money obviously wasn't
enough. So, jail. I hope his fellow inmates really like spammers.

Steve

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