Project Honeypot aims to trap spammers

Found on New Scientist on Thursday, 03 February 2005
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After years developing anti-spam technology and drafting legislation to outlaw spammers, the delegates at MIT's annual Spam Conference in Boston were overjoyed to see the culprit nailed.

Jeremy Jaynes was found guilty last November by a state court in Leesburg, Virginia, of sending more than 10 million unsolicited emails a day. He was hawking pornography, work-at-home schemes and stock-picking software. The spams are estimated to have earned him around $750,000 a month. He is now on $1 million bail, forbidden from using the internet and will be sentenced this month. The jury has recommended he gets a nine-year jail term.

Jaynes's operation was run from a chaotic office in Raleigh, North Carolina. Cabling to 16 high-speed internet links snaked everywhere and there were CDs packed with spammed email addresses and servers holding spam emails. Even as the police arrived, spamming was in progress.

Project Honeypot, the brainchild of Chicago lawyer Matthew Prince, is taking advantage of a clause in the CAN-SPAM act that makes harvesting email addresses for spamming purposes illegal.

If I didn't mix up a few zeros, this means that spammers make 7.5 cent with every email. Not a bad income. No wonder spam keeps rising. As I said earlier, don't just try to block spam, also try to block their money.