posted 05-28-2004 12:11 PM                      

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 04-09-2005 09:23 AM                       

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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.