Men Face Charges Under Spam Law

Virginia authorities said Thursday that they had arrested and charged a North Carolina man for allegedly sending unwanted e-mail, in the first use of a new state anti-spam law that could bring penalties of 20 years in prison.

Virginia Atty. Gen. Jerry Kilgore said Jeremy Jaynes was arrested Thursday in Raleigh, N.C., and charged with four counts of using fraudulent means to transmit spam. Kilgore also said officials were in negotiations for the surrender of a second man, Richard Rutowski, on the same charges.

Jaynes and Rutowski are charged with violating limits on the number of messages a marketer can send and with falsifying routing information. Both acts are illegal under a Virginia law that carries penalties of one to five years in prison and fines of as much as $2,500 on each count.

Virginia officials charged that the two men sent more than 100,000 messages in a 30-day period this summer touting penny stocks, low mortgage rates and software to erase Internet browsing records.

Anti-spam group Spamhaus said Jaynes ranks as the eighth-worst spammer in the world. Neither Jaynes nor Rutowski could be reached for comment.

Although the suspects are based in North Carolina, Virginia is asserting jurisdiction because the pair sent messages through computers located in the state.

About 50% of the world’s Internet traffic passes through Virginia, home to big companies such as Time Warner Inc.’s America Online unit and WorldCom Inc.

Spam has grown from a minor annoyance to a major threat to the stability of the Internet, experts say. It makes up more than half of all e-mail traffic. AOL blocks as many as 2.4 billion spams each day, a company spokesman said.

At least 36 states have some sort of spam law on the books, and President Bush is expected to sign the first national measure into law as early as next week.

Internet service providers including AOL and EarthLink Inc. have sued spammers for damages, and New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer charged a Buffalo man this year with violating identity theft and forgery laws for allegedly sending spam. That charge could carry as many as seven years in prison.