Spam Kings (15 page)

Shiksaa was a big believer in
spammus interruptus
. When new junk emailers appeared on her radar screen—by sending
her spam or getting mentioned in anti-spam newsgroups—she made a point of paying them a
preemptive online visit. If the spammer had an America Online account, she would add the
screen name to her buddy list and wait to be notified that he or she was online. Then
Shiksaa would gently let the newbie know that anti-spammers like her would be hounding them
every step of the way. She wanted to divest them of any illusions that junk emailing was an
easy way to make a buck. Better to nip a chickenboner in the bud than to try to reform a
full-blown, Rokso-grade spam operation.

But it didn't work out quite that way with Scott Richter, president of Colorado-based
SaveRealBig, Inc. In July 2001, months before Richter gained the attention of other
anti-spammers for his post-9/11 U.S.A. flag ads, Shiksaa added his AOL screen name to her
buddy list. When Richter signed on one Saturday evening, she was all over him.

"Hey Scott. I hear you're spamming. Why?"
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Richter responded that she must have confused him with Chris Smith, a Minnesota spammer
who used the nickname Rizler. But Shiksaa refused to back down.

"Help me out here Scott. One of my friends said you spammed him. I was simply asking if
that was true."

"Not that I know of," said Richter.

To help jog his memory, Shiksaa sent Richter the Internet address of several newsgroup
postings where copies of his spams had appeared. The messages advertised pagers from a
company controlled by Richter. At least one of the spam runs had apparently been relayed
through a mail server in Russia.

A couple of minutes went by, and Richter still hadn't responded. Shiksaa assumed he was
reading the newsgroup link she had sent. While she was waiting, the AOL "You've Got Mail"
voice sounded, so she checked her in-box. Waiting for her there was a message from one of
America Online's administrators; it was a notice that the company had just received a report
that she was violating AOL's terms of service. The message cited an excerpt from her
conversation with Richter.

Before Shiksaa had a chance to explain, AOL's Member Services department suspended her
account for spamming.

Shiksaa managed to straighten out AOL over the phone and convinced the company to
reinstate her account. But the incident taught her an important lesson about Richter: he
knew how to work the system.

Shiksaa would later learn that Richter was the son of a certified public accountant and
tax lawyer in San Diego, California. Richter saw less of his dad, Steven S. Richter, after
age eleven, when his parents divorced and his dad moved out. But Richter had acquired his
father's interest in making and holding onto money.

Unlike his father, Scott didn't go to college and get a business degree. Instead, he
spent his time after high school running RAM Amusement Investments, Inc., a vending-machine
business he incorporated in 1991 with his mother as corporate secretary. That business
frequently took him into bars and restaurants, and he eventually opened his own chain of
50s-style restaurants around Denver known as Great Scott's Eatery, as well as a nightspot
called the Colorado Sports Café.

Spending so much time around good food did a number on Richter's weight. At one point
the six-foot-one Richter pushed the scales at nearly 300 pounds. So when the Internet
beckoned Richter to try his hand at online entrepreneurship in late 2000, spamming diet
pills seemed a natural choice. He even featured himself in a before-and-after photo at a web
site for Inferno, the ephedra-based supplement he was selling.

Deep in debt at the time as the result of stock market losses, Richter initially could
afford to hire only small-time spammers to deliver his Inferno ads, which listed the
Colorado Sports Café's street address as SaveRealBig's corporate headquarters. But as the
cash flow picked up, Richter turned to MindShare's Postmaster General system for most of his
mailing.

Shiksaa had noticed complaints on Nanae about SaveRealBig spams emanating from
MindShare's service. In late August, she posted a note on the newsgroup observing that
Richter apparently was using "dirty" mailing lists—containing addresses of people who hadn't
opted in to receive them—and that Postmaster General didn't seem to be aware of the
problem.

In early November 2001, more glaring proof appeared that Richter's lists weren't of the
highest quality. Using the Postmaster General system, SaveRealBig had emailed ads for
six-dollar cell-phone booster antennas to an Internet discussion list dedicated to the
Debian computer operating system. The ads carried the subject line "Vital Emergency
Strategy" and played on fears that new terrorist attacks would bring the sorts of
communications breakdowns that plagued World Trade Center rescue efforts: "Worried that you
or your loved ones won't be able to summon help in a crisis? The Amazing ezBooster is the
solution!"

By the end of the month, Richter's ads had caught the attention of America Online. The
big online service warned MindShare that, due to member complaints, it intended to remove
SaveRealBig from the "white list" of bulk emailers allowed to send messages to AOL members.
In response, MindShare's abuse manager (and former MAPS employee) Kelly Molloy Thompson
contacted Richter by email with an ultimatum: "You, as a list owner, will need to submit
documentation that the AOL addresses on your list were in fact collected through an opt-in
process."
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According to Thompson, Richter's documentation minimally needed to include the date and
time the user opted in, as well as his or her Internet protocol address. Failure to produce
such evidence within three days, she said, would result in SaveRealBig's messages "being
silently discarded" by AOL's spam filters.

Richter was unable to produce the proof by AOL's deadline. Like many email marketers, he
had built his mailing lists, which had grown to over ten million addresses at the time,
largely through what are known as coregistration deals. Under such arrangements, operators
of web services sell or trade their customer lists to other marketers. In some cases,
customers haven't actually given permission for their information to be shared, yet
unscrupulous marketers nonetheless pass off their lists as "opt in." In other instances,
sites hungry for sales leads essentially trick visitors into granting permission through
confusing fine print and numerous checkboxes. Then there are the lists sold as "co-reg"
leads which actually contain a blend of data, some of it harvested from the Internet. Not
surprisingly, spam complaints from coregistration lists can be common.

(Under pressure from ISPs such as AOL for complete documentation of coregistration data,
some fraudulent bulk emailers turned to software programs that could dummy up "proof" that
their addresses were not harvested from the Internet or otherwise obtained without the
permission of customers.)

Cut off from mailing to AOL through Postmaster General, Richter began focusing his ads
on general Internet addresses. But even then, his mailing lists continued to get him—and
MindShare—into trouble. In early December, spam from Richter arrived in the email in-box of
anti-spammer Morely Dotes. The message was sent through the PostMaster General service and
carried the subject line, "Why should men have all the fun?" It promoted a product called
Vigel, which it claimed was "a topical gel that increases feminine sexual pleasure and
excitement." According to the SaveRealBig web page advertised in the spam, Vigel contained
menthol and the amino acid L-arganine and was "guaranteed to improve your sex-life or your
money back!"

Morely Dotes forwarded a copy of the spam to MindShare's Internet service provider with
a recommendation that it block all traffic from the company, which he called "a
spam-for-hire outfit, with no legitimate users."

At the time, Richter publicly relished the bad-boy image he was gaining among
anti-spammers. When several of Richter's SaveRealBig sites were kicked off San Francisco ISP
Hurricane Electric in December 2001, Richter posted a note to Nanae that celebrated the
action.

"The more attention we get the more money we make. We are going to be big. REALBIG, the
name we use says it all ... we are legit and getting stronger by the day. The more people
talk about us the more companies find us. COMPLAINERS=$$$$$$," wrote Richter.

A few days later, as spam fighters were discussing Richter's listing on the Spews.org
blacklist, he jumped into the fray: "I love the public's eye and the attention. Keep
chatting; I LOVE EVERY MINUTE OF IT. MAKE ME FAMOUS."

But contrary to his public posturing, Richter was privately seething over the attention
his spams had generated. In early January 2002, he phoned management at Peer 1 Network, an
ISP based in British Columbia. Rob Mitzel, the ISP's abuse coordinator, had posted what
Richter considered defamatory comments on Nanae about SaveRealBig. When Richter threatened
to sue the company, Mitzel published a public apology on Nanae.

"On behalf of Peer 1 Network and myself, I would like to apologize to Scott Richter,
Richter Enterprises, and his various SaveRealBig.com domains, for any slight I may have
caused him," began Mitzel's mea culpa. (He concluded with a postscript that stated, "I am
not doing this on my own volition. This is being required of me by my company.")

The incident followed a similar lawsuit threat from Richter against Communitech, a
Missouri ISP that found itself on the Spews blacklist in September 2001 for hosting
Richter's sites. In December 2001, Richter targeted Communitech employee Randy Rostie after
he announced the ISP had kicked Richter off its service.

"I will take pleasure in suing you personally RANDY for all your remarks you made about
us," said Richter in a newsgroup message. "I hope your company is ready to stand behind you.
They will lose a lot more than your remarks will ever profit you," he added.

Meanwhile, Richter continued his public shenanigans aimed at getting under the skin of
anti-spammers. In January, Shiksaa noticed that Richter had somehow managed to get himself
listed at an online gallery of top spam fighters. Richter had apparently duped the site's
operator into including his photograph among those of scores of anti-spammers.

"Paging Snotty Scotty Richter," wrote Shiksaa in a message to Nanae, "you're a spamming
slime ball and not an anti-spammer."

By February 2002, Richter's SaveRealBig was in big trouble, thanks to smothering
blacklists and a shortage of ISPs willing to carry his web sites. In a change of strategy,
Richter decided to try a more conciliatory tone with anti-spammers in general and Shiksaa in
particular. He announced in a message to Nanae that his company was going to "reconfirm" its
list of thirteen million email addresses as part of an effort to clean up its
practices.

Richter said the process would involve sending a message to the entire list asking
recipients to confirm their interest in future mailings from his new company,
OptinRealBig
. To give the reconfirmation effort legitimacy, Richter said he wanted to retain
the services of "a reputable person to oversee this process...so that there are no questions
about us doing anything wrong."

A few days later, Richter followed up with a message specifically addressed to Shiksaa,
pleading with her to put the past behind her.

"I hope that you will not chase around our new sites, as we are doing what you have
wanted us to do for some time...life is much too short for games and I would much rather
work with the Anti Spam groups than against them," he wrote.
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But Shiksaa wasn't buying. She pointed out that he had recently registered the domain
Spam-Stopper.org
under his father's name.

"Here's a novel way to stop spam, Snotty...stop spamming!" Shiksaa said.

Then she posted the Internet address of Goodman & Richter, the San Diego law
firm where Richter's father was a partner. Shiksaa noted that, according to a profile at the
site, Steven Richter had one son.

"Poor Mr. Richter only had one loser son. That must really rankle," she wrote.

"I am old enough to never make fun of your family, but I could stoop to your level if
you want me to," was Richter's reply. "Let me know if you want to be professional or not. I
can play with you either way."

Shiksaa backed off at that point. Then a few days later, she received an instant message
from a stranger using the screen name EZBulkMail4U.
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"Leave Richter alone. He's trying to do the RIGHT THING."

"Go to hell, spammer," she replied.

"You people don't know who ur messin with."

"And who might you be?" asked Shiksaa.

"I won't tell you that, sorry. But I'd be careful if I was you. That's a
warning."

"Careful of what, pray tell?" she asked.

"Someone will get in trouble over this thing," said EZBulkMail4U, and then he signed
off.

Shiksaa wasn't intimidated by the warning from EZBulkMail4U and went right back to
tangling with Richter on Nanae. One day in the middle of March, newsgroup regulars were
treated to some especially heated banter between the two. At the time, spam fighters had
been discussing the belated announcement by MindShare that it had hired Kelly Molloy
Thompson as well as another former MAPS director named Peter Popovich to enforce its
anti-spam policies. Some anti-spammers argued that the continuing flow of spam from
MindShare's Postmaster General service proved that the former MAPS employees had been
co-opted.

Suddenly, Richter piped up with an offer to hire Shiksaa as his company's email abuse
officer.

"I would give you what ever you wanted to run our AUP [acceptable use policy] and would
give you full control. I just think you're too scared to take the challenge," said
Richter.
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