Spam Kings (18 page)
Let's say you send a million emails on Sunday night and Monday morning your site is
shut down for spamming. Uh oh! Your customers click on the order link in your email and
get a message like this: "The webpage you are attempting to access is unavailable. The
owners of this website have violated our terms of service and their account is
terminated." This screams "fraud" to your customers. They certainly can't place an order
online, and they won't be too eager to place a telephone order or send cash if they see a
message like that. Your goal must be to maximize the life of your website. It's not easy,
but I know some tricks of the trade.
Hawke then provided a detailed description of "The Switcheroo," a technique he claimed
to have developed for avoiding lost sales from web site downtime. The trick, also known as
"domain floating," required lining up more than one ISP to host a spammed domain. When the
primary hosting firm canceled Hawke's account after receiving complaints, he went online and
modified the DNS-delegation information on file at his domain registrar, so that the domain
now directed users to the new hosting firm's server.
Assuming spammers had adopted his technique of sending ads on Friday evenings, Hawke
described how the Switcheroo would work:
Since you can expect your website to be nullified on Monday morning, you need
to...point your domain to your secondary webhost on Sunday night. It will take 12-24 hours
for the change to take effect, and this will be your only downtime all week. As soon as
the delegation details are updated - presto! You're back online again, and your customers
will never know you switched from one webhost to another on Monday...and yes, it works
every time.
Hawke might have written the book on bulk emailing, but his spam-related income was
dwarfed by Bournival's in late 2002. Bournival was clearing up to fifteen thousand dollars
each week, but in the middle of December, his joyride with Maxaman came to an end.
Certified Natural notified him that it had been receiving too many complaints about his
Maxaman spams. The company loved the money he was bringing in, but it did not like the heat
generated by his ads. So Certified proposed a new "private label" agreement. It would
package the pills under a new name, "Pinacle," but without any identification linked to
Certified Natural. It would also provide Bournival with professionally designed web pages
incorporating the new Pinacle product identity. No other Certified customers would be
allowed to sell pills under the Pinacle name.
Bournival wasn't happy about killing his golden goose. Maxaman had made him one of the
wealthiest teenagers around. It would take some effort to update his ad copy and rebuild his
web sites with the new pages. But it could be a plus to market an exclusive product.
Bournival agreed to the new plan, and a few days before Christmas 2002, he started mailing
out his first ads for Pinacle.
To his relief, the orders came in more strongly than ever. But that just underscored
another problem he'd been having: bumping into the $30,000 combined monthly limit on his
Basic Internet Marketing Services merchant accounts. To give himself more headroom, he had
arranged to open an account in his grandfather's name as well. But for the past couple of
months, Bournival had been forced to halt mailing before the end of the month because he had
exceeded the sales limit on his accounts. It was aggravating to know that he was leaving
money on the table like that.
A possible solution presented itself when Bournival was playing chess one day with a
local chess star. Kevin Cotreau, a 41-year-old former New Hampshire state chess champion,
ran a small computer consulting business. The holder of a USCF rating of over 2200, Cotreau
was fascinated by Bournival's story of becoming a victim of his own spam success. As they
talked, Bournival asked Cotreau if he'd be interested in getting in on the lucrative
penis-pill business without having to send a single spam message. All he had to do was use
his solid credit rating to sign up for a merchant account with a high monthly limit, say
$250,000. Then Bournival would send his Pinacle orders to Cotreau, who would submit them to
the bank for processing. Bournival would pay Cotreau a 5-percent cut on all orders he
processed through the account.
The two sealed the deal in January 2003 by jointly incorporating Secure Internet
Marketing LLC.
Anticipating a huge surge in sales, Bournival decided it was time to move his business
out of the apartment and into a proper office space. After shopping around a bit, he found a
2,700-square-foot space in a refurbished mill building in downtown Manchester. The previous
tenant had been the failed U.S. Senate campaign of former New Hampshire governor Jeanne
Shaheen. Now Bournival would use it to house dozens of computers, work areas for packing and
shipping, and row upon row of penis pills in cartons.
Bournival also hired a lawyer to create another company, Amazing Internet Products, LLC.
As a limited liability corporation, the new company would potentially shield Bournival to
some extent from legal problems arising from the business. Or so he was told.
Bournival was finally ready to bust loose, but weeks went by and Cotreau failed to
locate a financial services firm willing to give him an unlimited merchant account. That's
when Hawke waltzed into Bournival's office with an enticing but mysterious offer.
Hawke said he had been talking with a guy who made millions of dollars during the
dot-com boom years. This person had helped found some sort of online payment-processing firm
along the lines of PayPal but had cashed out before the company went bust. According to
Hawke, the fellow, who was in his forties, had numerous connections in the banking industry
and was willing to broker a deal with Hawke for a limitless merchant accountâin exchange for
a 10-percent cut, 2.5 percent of which would go to the bank.
"Does he realize you are a spammer?" Bournival asked, incredulous.
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"Correctomundo," said Hawke. "He has no problem whatsoever with spam."
Then Hawke laid his cards on the table.
"I could let you process your orders through me and my contact," he suggested, and then
added, "but I have a better idea."
Hawke said he and Bournival should start a new spamming company as equal partners. They
would continue to sell Pinacle, but Bournival would primarily handle order fulfillment and
customer service, while Hawke would do most of the spamming. In addition, Hawke would create
an affiliate system, orchestrating a team of spammers who would send out ads for Pinacle and
earn a commissionâsomething along the lines of what Dr. Fatburn was doing with his diet pill
and anti-virus software business. Finally, of course, Hawke would handle the crucial
merchant-account relationship.
Bournival said the idea sounded interesting, but he had doubts about the key element:
the mystery financier. Next thing Bournival knew, Hawke was on his cell phone, setting up a
meeting with the man, who was based in the Midwest. A few days later, Bournival and Hawke,
dressed in suits and trying their hardest to impress, were taking the financier on a tour of
the new headquarters of Amazing Internet Products LLC. That evening, they closed the deal
over dinner in the Bedford Village Inn, a luxury restaurant and guesthouse built on the site
of a nineteenth-century farm in the woods outside Manchester.
In the nearly eighteen months since Hawke first tutored Bournival, the two spammers had
never really combined forces. But in March of 2003, armed with their unlimited merchant
account, together they unleashed a torrent of Pinacle spam on the Internet.
As Amazing Internet Products, they sent millions of ads that month, with Bournival
pumping them out from his T1 in Manchester and Hawke doing the same with his in Pawtucket.
Hawke also enlisted some of his Rhode Island gang to join up as the first Pinacle
Affiliates. He set up Mauricio Ruiz, Loay Samhoun, and the two MikesâClark and Torresâwith
software, mailing lists, and Pinacle ad copy and promised them a twenty-dollar commission
for every fifty-dollar bottle of pills they sold. (Amazing Internet paid Certified just five
dollars per bottle, leaving plenty of room for profit after affiliate commissions.)
The group stuck primarily with the ads Bournival had ripped off from Vig-RX, using a
rotating collection of message subject lines, including:
Size DOES Matter. Enlarge your penis NOW!
Transform your rod into a monster
Want a king-size PENIS in one week?
Grow your PENIS 2 inches in 2 days!
Add to your manhood
Bournival began using the site he maintained for the New Hampshire Chess Association as
a staging area for Amazing Internet Products's web sites. He would upload files to a special
directory at NHChess.org
, after which Hawke would download and distribute them to the company's handful
of web servers scattered throughout the world.
With the launch of Amazing Internet Products, Hawke and Bournival debuted a new
technique for keeping their spammed sites online. In the past, they had registered only a
few sites, choosing relatively memorable names such as producthaven.com, never-paymore.com,
and 2003marketing.net. When a site came under attack from anti-spammers, they would use
Hawke's Switcheroo technique and modify the domain record so it pointed to a different ISP's
web server, preserving the domain for use in future spams.
The new method, by contrast, treated domains as expendable. The spammers registered
scores of addresses with nonsensical names such as jesitack.com, soothling.com,
scorping.com, and kohrah.com. Each pointed to one of several web servers, usually located in
China or controlled by a Rokso-listed South American spam-hosting company called Super
Zonda. If a domain got blacklisted after a spam run, Hawke and Bournival would drop it
completely and begin using one of the other warehoused domains in subsequent spams.
When registering domains for Amazing Internet, Hawke and Bournival usually listed a
bogus name ("George Baldwan" and "Clell Miller" were two early favorites), along with the
address of their MailBoxes Etc. box in Manchester and Bournival's phone number and Yahoo!
email account.
But for a brief period, either Hawke or Bournivalâneither admitted to being
responsibleâalso put Alan "Dr. Fatburn
" Moore's name on some of their numerous domain registrations. When Dr. Fatburn
found out, he assumed Hawke did it to shunt onto Fatburn some of the complaints and
harassment about spams from QuikSilver and Amazing Internet.
Dr. Fatburn was doubly furious a few weeks later, when Hawke abruptly stopped selling
EPP diet pills so he could work full-time on Amazing Internet's Pinacle campaign. Hawke had
been sending his orders for EPP to Dutch International, which processed them and paid Dr.
Fatburn a commission on each sale for having signed up Hawke as a distributor. A few weeks
after Hawke cashed out, Dutch International received several thousand dollars of customer
product returns and charge-backs on Hawke's account. The company sent Hawke a bill for the
balance he owed, which Hawke simply ignored, as he was prone to do with many of his debts.
As a result, Dutch International ended up taking some of the money out of Dr. Fatburn's
subsequent commission checks.
Although Amazing Internet Products was just a few weeks old at the time, the groundwork
for its eventual demise was already being laid.
Aside from Davis Hawke, Dr. Fatburn had few major problems with his downline
distributors or sales affiliates. In 2002, their spamsâfor diet pills, colon cleanser, and
herbal Viagraâhelped make him a wealthy man. As proof, Dr. Fatburn posted scans of his
commission checks at his web site, ultimatediets.com, showing he had made up to $14,000 in a
single month. (That was just the tip of the iceberg. Fatburn would later make nearly that
much daily selling counterfeit anti-virus software.)
He boasted that his income enabled him to purchase, without a mortgage, "a new
2,400-square-foot home in a very nice area of Maryland." In less than twelve months, Fatburn
had gone from being a chickenboner to being quoted in mainstream press articles about email
advertising. In December 2002, his photograph even graced the pages of a
Newsweek
article about spam.
The beauty of it was that Dr. Fatburn had stopped pushing the send button himself around
August 2002. He paid marketing affiliates a commission of nearly 60 percent to do that dirty
work, but the hefty fee was worth it to insulate him from the hassles of drumming up sales.
Unfortunately, his web sites remained under constant attack from anti-spammers and had been
listed on blacklists such as Spews for months. But that didn't stop him from publishing his
name, home address, and telephone numbers in big print on his sites. His mindset remained
the same as it had when he put his name on his first spams in 2001: he was an honest,
ethical businessman who had nothing to hide.
Dr. Fatburn's decision to leave the spamming to others came shortly after his first
online encounter with Shiksaa. One morning in late July of 2002, she contacted him over AOL
Instant Messenger (AIM).
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"Hey, Dr. Fatburn. How's the bulletproof hosting going?"
"Going great. Why do you ask?" he replied, and then asked who she was.
"I'm an anti-spammer, Dr F."
"Oh, that's a cool job I guess," said Dr. Fatburn.
She tried to get him to talk about the "bulk friendly" hosting he had advertised at the
Bulk Barn
and his ads for herbal Viagra. But Fatburn wasn't taking the bait.
"Glad to know you are around...Why don't you get a real job?" he asked.
"I have a real job, hon."
Then Shiksaa cut and pasted the domain registration for his site Bulkherbal.com, which
included his contact information in Maryland.
"That is you, no?" she asked.
"The funny thing about this whole thing is I don't send out anything. I have hundreds of
affiliates marketing my products and one or two guys spam. Yet you lump my entire business
as a spam operation. It's quite comical."
"Yes, I saw your info from the Bulk Barn, soliciting spammers," she replied.
"Actually Bulk Barn, for those who do not actually read all the posts, is a great place
to find opt-in lists of retail buyers. Bet you didn't know that, did you?"
Shiksaa nearly spat her morning coffee onto her keyboard.
"Opt-in? LOL!" she typed, and for good measure added "hahahaha."
Later that summer, others took notice of Dr. Fatburn's expanding junk email operation.
Symantec
, the big California-based software firm, was ramping up efforts to block sales
of unauthorized ("counterfeit") copies of its popular Norton SystemWorks
anti-virus and computer utility software. Symantec's anti-piracy division had
learned that Dr. Fatburn had begun marketing CD-ROMs of Norton SystemWorks, without manuals
or retail packaging. In a September 2002
BusinessWeek
article about
software scams on the Internet, Symantec's director of security said the company was
investigating several suspected counterfeiters, including Dr. Fatburn.
Dr. Fatburn denied that there was anything illegal about his sales of Symantec products.
The article quoted him as saying he got the software from wholesalers and that Symantec had
originally intended the CD-ROMs for distribution by PC manufacturers.
"Nothing we sell has ever been pirated, bogus, or advertised as anything but what the
customer ordered," Dr. Fatburn told the magazine.
Despite Symantec's saber rattling, weeks went by, and Dr. Fatburn heard nothing directly
from the company. Then, in late November 2002, ads touting anti-virus software from one of
Dr. Fatburn's affiliates landed in the personal email inbox of Francis Uy, a computer
technician and tutor at Johns Hopkins University
in Baltimore, Maryland. The 33-year-old Uy (pronounced Wee) had been a spam
opponent and Nanae participant for years, but he was glad to see this particular
message.
A month before, the State of Maryland had enacted a spam law governing junk emails sent
by or to citizens of the state. Under the law, residents could sue in small claims court for
up to $500 for every offending spam they received. Uy considered the law flawed, because it
contained a "knowledge clause" that required the recipient to prove that the spammer should
have known the recipient was a Maryland resident. But Uy hoped the law would help pressure
spammers who operated in the state. And Linthicum, Maryland-based Dr. Fatburn provided Uy
with the perfect test case.
From his office at Johns Hopkins, Uy dug up Dr. Fatburn's phone number and called him.
Uy wanted to verify that the spam wasn't the result of a Joe-job. A prickly Fatburn answered
and admitted the message was probably legit, but claimed it had been sent by an affiliate
and that he was not responsible. Uy hung up without identifying himself.
That evening, Uy added a new page to his personal home page at the Tripod home page
service. He gave it the title "Frankie Say No Spam," below which he created a section called
"Maryland's Most Wanted Spammers." There, he listed several of Fatburn's phone numbers,
email accounts, and mailing addresses. The page also offered links to articles that
mentioned the spammer, along with information about the Maryland spam law. Uy also added the
line "Don't crap in my back yard!" at the top of the page.
For weeks, Dr. Fatburn was unaware of Uy's site. But in December, he suspected something
was amiss when he began to receive more than the usual number of harassing phone calls from
anti-spammers. One called his cell phone in the middle of the night while he and his fiancée
were sleeping. "We're watching you..." the male caller kept repeating. Others phoned on his
toll-free number and sang him the "Spam, spam, spam, spam" line from the Monty Python
skit.
The surge of attention from anti-spammers forced a change in tactics from Dr. Fatburn.
He started fudging the contact information in his Internet domain registrations, replacing
his real name and street address with the pseudonym "John Smitherine" and a post office box.
Fatburn also made arrangements to have a security system installed at his house and
contacted the telephone company to discuss tracing his calls.
The wave of harassment had already made Dr. Fatburn rather testy when Shiksaa contacted
him over AIM one December afternoon and began to needle him about his company's spam.
"Shut your mouth," he snarled. "Hit delete if you do not like what affiliates mail you.
We help the economy and people save money. You do nothing but bitch!"
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A few days later, after Shiksaa continued to pester him about his business, Dr. Fatburn
lashed out at her again. He called her a "crazy woman" and ordered her to leave him
alone.
"I am too busy making thousands of dollars to worry about talking to a lunatic anymore,
so we will part company as of now," he said. Shiksaa honored Dr. Fatburn's request and
didn't chat with him again, even when he tried several times to initiate contact with her
via instant message later that month.
But other anti-spammers continued to hound him by telephone. In January 2003, after
someone phoned to harass him, Dr. Fatburn asked the caller how he had gotten his phone
number. The man told him the information was published on the Internet at a site called
"Frankie Say No Spam."
Dr. Fatburn typed the words into a search engine and moments later was staring at Uy's
web site. A furious Fatburn scoured the site for information about its author. On one page
he found a link to what appeared to be the home page of the author's wife, as well as a
mention of his daughter. After a little sleuth work, Fatburn was on the phone to Uy's home.
An answering machine picked up, so Fatburn left a brief message including his phone number
and a request that Uy return his call.
A few days passed, and Dr. Fatburn still hadn't heard back from Uy. He might have
pursued Uy harder if a public-relations disaster hadn't suddenly exploded in his face. On
January 15, 2003, InternetNews.com published an article about a security flaw at Fatburn's
Salesscape.com web site. The hole enabled web surfers to view hundreds of customer orders
for Norton SystemWorks, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addressesâbut
not credit card numbers. The reporter was unable to reach Dr. Fatburn for a comment. But a
Symantec spokesperson told InternetNews that Fatburn's company, Maryland Internet Marketing,
was selling pirated software and that Symantec had warned him to cease and desist.
"He is not the kind of guy to listen the first or second time around," said the
spokesperson, adding that Symantec was proceeding legally.
When Dr. Fatburn heard about the security problem, he moved quickly to protect his
customer-order directory with a password. But a few weeks after the article appeared, Dr.
Fatburn was added to the Spamhaus Register of Known Spam Operations (Rokso). Soon
thereafter, Shiksaa broke a long hiatus and contacted Dr. Fatburn over AIM.
"Georgie, have you been sued yet?"
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"No, and I wont be," was his curt reply. "We don't break any laws."
"You're selling pirated Symantec products," she said.
"Symantec knows where I live and knows what we sell is their software. It's not pirated,
never was," he replied, adding, "Believe what you want, anti. You guys have so many things
screwed up."
"Alan, you know you spam. I know you spam. The entire world knows you spam," said
Shiksaa.
"If I was breaking the law, they would have did something," insisted Fatburn.
"Uh huh. I feel sorry for you. You're a pathetic loser."
"Believe what you want. I truly do not care. You are nothing to me. Never was, never
will be," he said.
"You dig me. All my spammers do."
Dr. Fatburn wasn't sure what Shiksaa meant by that.
"I am making more money in one week then you will see in your lifetime. Who is pathetic
now?" he asked.
"You are, Alan."
"Say what you want. I couldn't care less. Just don't say it to me via email, or IM. You
have been warned," he said.
Then Fatburn pulled out the heavy artillery.
"Note that my attorney has been in the process of digging up all your libelous posts and
will use it against you in our suit. See what's it like being sued by someone who has the
means to bring you to justice for your words."
"Yeah, whatever," Shiksaa typed in reply.
"We may have freedom of speech in this country, but you cannot make wild claims about a
corporation and think we are not going to take legal action. You will be my project this
year," he threatened.
"Yeah, whatever," she repeated.
"Get ready, Susan, because I know more about you than you know."
While Shiksaa was mulling over that statement, Dr. Fatburn went on to say that he was
also in the process of getting the Nanae newsgroup shut down.
"You guys will have to find another place to hang together and talk about your pathetic
lives," he said.
Shiksaa had intended to keep quiet at that point, but she couldn't hold her tongue after
seeing this last threat.
"LOL!" she blurted out. Since Nanae was a part of the Usenet system and was distributed
on computers all over the world, it would be both legally and technically impossible for
anyone to eradicate the newsgroup.
But Dr. Fatburn wasn't finished with her yet.
"Your actions are going to be the end of all you stand for," he predicted. "Have a great
night and sleep tight knowing that tomorrow, when you return to your boring job, I will be
here loving every second of my so-called pathetic life."
Many spam fighters on Nanae hadn't paid much attention to Dr. Fatburn prior to that day
in late February 2003. But when Shiksaa published the log file of the conversation, and
anti-spammers saw Fatburn's threats to silence her and the newsgroup, many went scurrying to
search engines to dig up information on him. Some discovered Francis Uy's web site and the
various phone numbers published there. That set off a new wave of harassing phone calls to
Dr. Fatburn, including a chilling one that warned him to be careful when he started his
car.
Dr. Fatburn had had enough. One Saturday afternoon in early March, he reached Uy at his
home by telephone. Fatburn insisted that Uy take down his web site within twenty-four hours
or face a lawsuit.
"Why? It's all public information," said a startled Uy. He pointed out that the site
contained only data that had been published on the Internet. He told Fatburn that he had
lifted Fatburn's contact information directly from his own sites.
Dr. Fatburn told him that wasn't the point.
"You're inciting people to harass me. I've got people calling me in the middle of the
night with death threats. They're signing me up for magazine subscriptions and books. It's
all because of your web site," Fatburn insisted.
Uy was surprised to learn that some anti-spammers had gone too far. But he stood his
ground. "I'm not the one harassing you," he said.
Frustrated with Uy's stubbornness, Dr. Fatburn vowed to take any action necessary to get
the site shut down.
"You've got a family. You've got a daughter. Is that worth one little page? You don't
realize the repercussions of your actions," he said.
