During his career as one of the world’s most prolific spammers, the prosecution claimed that James amassed a fortune of some $24 million. According to prosecutors, he was churning out up to a million emails a day. Despite a response rate of 0.3 per cent he was bringing in around $750,000 a month.
Amongst the ‘products’ offered via his mass emailing were pornography, fake products and work-at-home schemes which purported to allow people to earn up to $75 an hour working from home. The prosecution had told the jury that in a single month Jaynes had received 10,000 credit card orders – each for the scam.
Although a resident of Raleigh, North Carolina, Jaynes’s trial took place in Loudon County, Virginia – the home of AOL. He was tried under State Law, which makes it an offence to use false internet addresses and aliases to send mass emails. James was convicted under this law of using the AOL servers to send the spoof emails.
Jeese! That’s a ton of money. You would think the guy would have been intelligent enough to call it quits after the first few million.
Aaron Fulkerson 