Jeremy Jaynes (30), known as one of the world's top 10 spammers, has been sentenced to nine years of jail for sending millions of unsolicited and fraudulous emails.

Having his sister Jessica DeGroot (28) as his personal assistant, Jaynes used to send up to 10,000,000 emails every day, using 16 high-speed Internet lines. The email addresses were hacked from the AOL customer database and from the online auction site eBay. Jessica DeGroot was charged with identical accusations, but got away with only a $7,500 fine. A third defendant in the same trial, Richard Rutowski, has been acquitted.

The spammer had a low response rate but even so, he used to receive among 10,000 and 17,000 credit card orders every month.

Jaynes' favorite subjects were work-at-home schemes, pornography, low interest mortgages and several email harvesting softwares. He was using the Gaven Stubberfield alias, that was rated as the eighth most active spammer in the cyber-world. Using a fake return address and bogus contact information, the brother-sister team violated the US almost 1 year old anti-spam law: the Can Spam Act. The defense lawyer admitted that his client was a bulk email sender, but argued that it has never been proved the emails Jaynes sent had been unsolicited. Also, he complained about the anti-spam law limitating the freedom of speech.

Since it was passed at the beginning of 2004, Can Spam Law received some vehement critics, being an opt-out law among them. Unsolicited bulk email is now estimated at around 75% of total emails sent.