Spam Kings

by McWilliams, Brian S

  The computerized attacks on Cyber Promotions and its ISP continued unabated throughout the summer of 1997, leading some Nanae regulars to grow alarmed at the new trend toward electronic violence by anti-spam vigilantes. Bill Mattocks, the recipient of a Golden Mallet Award, argued that the spam wars must be fought ethically, with tactics that kept anti-spammers on the moral high ground. On August 8, 1997, Mattocks, the operator of a computer-consulting firm in Wisconsin, posted a four-page note to Nanae with the subject line, "HACKERS, WISE UP!" In the message he noted that anti-spam crusaders had successfully built a nonviolent grassroots movement opposed to junk email.

  "We're gaining converts who are not technically proficient with computers, but they are on the Internet, and they hate spam, too. They are our allies. We must reach out to them and teach them to teach others," wrote Mattocks. He argued that the spam war was as much a public relations fight as anything and chided Nanae readers who had used the information from Hacker-X to attack Wallace.

  "Shame on you," he wrote. "You are going to bring discredit on the rest of the anti-spammers. STOP IT!"

  Mattocks's advice went largely ignored. The very next day, an unidentified person hacked into NetScum.net and replaced its usual home page with lewd messages about Wallace and Phil Lawlor, the chief executive officer of AGIS, Wallace's ISP. The site went offline shortly thereafter, returned in its original form a few months later, and then went dark again for good in the middle of October 1997, when AGIS cut off service to Cyber Promotions, citing the constant attacks from anti-spammers. Six months later, after failing to line up a new ISP, and finding himself hamstrung by legal settlements with ISPs that forbade him from ever again spamming their members, Wallace announced his retirement.

  In an April 1998 note on Nanae, Wallace apologized for his past actions and said that newsgroup participants, in particular Mattocks and a popular anti-spammer named Jim Nitchals, had earned his respect. "It is now clear to me that most of you *are really here* to stop spam - not just for the thrill ride...BOTTOM LINE: You folks are WINNING the war against spam."

  With Wallace vanquished, anti-spammers turned their attention to smaller foes, whom they jokingly referred to as chickenboners. Unlike big operators such as Wallace who incorporated their businesses and maintained office space with hired employees and other trappings of legitimacy, chickenboners were imagined by spam fighters as living in mobile homes with a personal computer on the kitchen table, surrounded by beer cans and buckets of take-out fried chicken.

  Veteran spam fighters tended to dismiss the skills of chickenboners, but Gunn was taking no chances when she finally decided to join the ranks of anti-spammers in early 1999. Her first move was to create a new screen name under her master AOL account, which was based on a permutation of her real name, to protect her true identity. "Shiksa" was her first choice. A few years back, the mother of a Jewish man Gunn had been dating called her that when the woman thought Gunn was out of earshot. It was a derogatory Yiddish term used to describe non-Jewish females, but Gunn liked the name. When she tried to sign up for Shiksa at AOL, however, it was already taken. So she added an extra letter, and "Shiksaa," her new anti-spam persona, was born.

  * * *

  [4] The first use of the term "spam" to refer to junk email and Usenet messages appeared in April 1993, after an incident involving a program called ARMM (Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation). Created by Richard Depew, a system administrator in Ohio, ARMM accidentally posted 200 copies of the same message to the news.admin.policy newsgroup on March 31, 1993. In response, an Internet user in Australia compared the ARMM incident to a comedy routine from the British television series Monty Python's Flying Circus. First broadcast in 1970, the sketch features two customers at a café who discover that every item on the menu includes Hormel's SPAM canned meat. At one point, a group of Vikings enters and loudly sings a song about "spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam," drowning out the café customers' conversation.

  Chapter 2.

  Hawke Mails the Web Manual

  While most of South Carolina was bracing for the impending arrival of Hurricane Floyd on September 15, 1999, Davis Hawke was calmly surfing the Internet from Chesnee. The hurricane, packing 130 mile-per-hour winds at sea, was expected to make landfall on the Carolina coast that evening. Governor Hodges had ordered the mandatory evacuation of four coastal counties, causing a massive snarl of cars on I-26, the state's biggest highway. Over half a million people sought higher ground ahead of the forecasted damaging winds, heavy rain, and widespread flooding.

  A category three storm like Floyd could easily level a flimsy structure like Hawke's rented mobile home. But he was staying put. Chesnee was two hundred miles from the shore, sheltered in the southern foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As evening approached, wind gusts occasionally rattled the trailer's sheet-metal siding, and sporadic sprinkles of rain drummed on the metal roof. But the power and phone service remained on as Hawke logged onto InnovaNet, an ISP in nearby Clemson. Hawke had recently signed up for the service under a new pseudonym, James Kincaid.

  Hawke had been spending a lot of time in the trailer since the disastrous rally in Washington, D.C. In recent days, as fall classes resumed at Wofford College, he'd managed to resist a strong seasonal force akin to what migratory birds must experience each autumn. For fifteen years he had found comfort in the cyclic back-to-school ritual. But this year Hawke stayed hunkered down in his trailer, working mostly on his eBay auctions.

  Even if he hadn't renounced Wofford, there was no way Hawke could fund a return to the college. His mother had threatened to leave his father unless he completely cut Hawke off financially. So now Hawke was forced to live off his dwindling savings and the income generated by his remaining stock of Nazi knives, buckles, and other paraphernalia. Meanwhile, the college was sending him notices about paying last spring's tuition. And a bank in Spartanburg was on his case for a nearly $5,000 credit card bill. Hawke was a month shy of his twenty-first birthday, and already his credit was nearly shot.[1]

  To help with the finances, Patricia was working as an assistant at a karate studio in a Spartanburg shopping plaza. That left Hawke alone in the trailer most afternoons. It was a bit like his high school days, when he would come home from school and read or go online for hours. His mother used to beg him to get outside for fresh air or to call a friend to play tennis. But aside from weekend chess tournaments, Britt, as his parents called him, rarely ventured out and instead spent much of his free time on the Internet. Sometimes he'd play chess with other Internet users, but mostly he was surfing the Web or hanging out in chat rooms. When his mother would came and checked in on him, Britt quickly pushed the Alt and Tab keys to bring up a chessboard screen.

  Peggy Ambler Davis Greenbaum had no reason to be suspicious of her son. Throughout his childhood, Britt never needed disciplining. When he was an elementary and middle school student in rural Lakeville, Massachusetts, teachers singled him out, praising him for both his schoolwork and his chess. ("The next Bobby Fischer!" they'd exclaim.)

  Teachers didn't realize that in their efforts to motivate other students to be like Britt, they had incited some to hate him. Kids detested his braininess, his pretty-boy looks, and his Jewish last name. A shy child, Britt was an easy target for teasing and, eventually, physical abuse, although he never reported it to his parents. Once in sixth grade when he was in his room changing, his mom noticed scratches and bruises all over his back. When she forced him to explain, he told her bullies had thrown him over a chair. The next day his mom marched Britt into the principal's office to complain. But the principal only made her more furious.

  "Tell Britt to fight back," he advised, "and if he manages to beat up the kids, take him out to dinner to celebrate."

  There were no celebratory dinners. Instead, Britt's parents moved the family to Westwood, a suburb of Boston they hoped would have fewer rednecks. The strategy worked. In the more affluent town his last name and scholarship were much less conspicuous. But as
other Westwood High students were being drawn into sports or social events after school, Britt was rereading Hitler's Mein Kampf or wandering the Internet's back alleys, where he discovered white-supremacy web sites.

  Now, after shuttering his own neo-Nazi web site and email accounts, Hawke had lost contact with his former comrades. The trailer was still loaded with Nazi gear, but it no longer had such a powerful effect on him. He still liked to carry around his SS dagger, but he never wore the uniforms anymore. Most of the Nazi items had just become eBay inventory. The stuff practically sold itself, and he completed around a dozen successful auctions every day. Yet Hawke quickly grew weary of the labor involved. He calculated that selling a swastika pin that netted him five dollars in profits easily consumed half an hour of his time, if you figured in exchanging emails with prospective buyers, packaging and shipping, and the occasional hassles over collecting payments. He could be making that kind of money working retail at the Spartanburg mall.

  Fortunately, Hawke had stumbled upon an easier way. Around Labor Day, he received an email at his Yahoo! account advertising an Internet marketing kit. For ninety-nine dollars, Hawke could buy Stealth Mail Bomber—a software program for sending emails in bulk—along with a mailing list of one million addresses, and a manual about selling on the Internet.

  As he read the ad, Hawke brightened. The most effortless way to do e-commerce, he realized, would be to sell digital rather than physical goods—products such as software or electronic newsletters and books that could be marketed and delivered over the Internet without any heavy lifting. Hawke visited the web site listed in the message and ordered the kit using his nearly maxed-out credit card. The next day, an email arrived with directions on how to copy the kit from an Internet site.

  After downloading and unpacking the files, Hawke skimmed the manual. As he expected, it was thin on content—just a twenty-page Microsoft Word document full of e-business platitudes the author had probably cut and pasted from a web site or cribbed from a booklet off a supermarket rack. (As Hawke had hoped, there was no copyright notice or even the author's name anywhere in the document.) Stealth Mail Bomber, on the other hand, appeared packed with features, although it was a bit confusing. And the address list intrigued him. As he scrolled through the seemingly bottomless file, Hawke did some quick calculations. If he could sell the manual to just 1 percent of the people for, say, twenty dollars, he'd make $200,000 on his hundred-dollar investment.

  Television news reports that evening said Hurricane Floyd was whipping Hilton Head Island and other coastal towns with several inches of rain per hour and winds over sixty miles per hour. Something about the approaching storm spurred Hawke to move ahead quickly with his new venture. He surfed to the Network Solutions web site and registered a new domain, WebManual2000.com. When prompted for his name, Hawke listed James Kincaid, although he provided his real Spartanburg post office box as the mailing address as well as his own phone number. He also made arrangements online with Interspeed Network, a California ISP, to host the WebManual2000 site on its servers.

  The next day, Floyd swerved up the coast to North Carolina, sparing South Carolina major damage. The sun was shining in Chesnee as Hawke began designing the WebManual2000.com site using Netscape Composer, a program for writing hypertext mark-up language (HTML), the code used to display web pages. In his haste he didn't realize he had neglected to update the author setting on Composer's preferences menu since creating the Knights of Freedom site. As a result, buried in the code of the new site was one of Hawke's former aliases: Walther Krueger, a German officer decorated in World War II. Hawke intentionally borrowed one feature from KOF.net: a special order form with which shoppers could input their name, email address, phone number, and credit card information. When they clicked a button, the information would be sent from WebManual2000.com to a new email account he set up for the business: attainwealth@yahoo.com.

  A few days later, WebManual2000.com was almost ready for business. Then came the most important part: composing an email ad for the manual. He decided to sell the Web Manual for $19.99, taking a no-hype approach that borrowed much of its language from the original message he had received for the kit:

  I know what you're thinking, another cheap sales pitch, another scam. There are hundreds of "get rich quick" schemes on the Internet and you're probably convinced this is just another fraud. But if you've gotten this far, please read on. The information that I'm selling is not going to make you rich overnight, and you won't be passing Bill Gates in a Porsche next week. But you WILL learn the most important money-making skills in the world today: Internet marketing and sales...

  On the following Saturday night, Hawke finally had all the pieces in place. With Patricia watching over his shoulder, he fired up Stealth Mail Bomber. He configured the program to use "Learn How to Make $1,000,000 In Six Months—GUARANTEED!" as his message subject line. Then he signed on to the Internet and, with a smile at Patricia, clicked the program's start button. They went to bed while the program slowly churned through his mailing list.

  Hawke awoke early the next morning, eager to learn the results of his mailing. He was annoyed to find that his computer had somehow disconnected from the Internet during the night. According to the status window on Stealth Mail Bomber, the program had successfully sent out just over 108,000 copies of the Web Manual ad before going offline.

  Hawke quickly reconnected to the Internet and logged in to the Yahoo! email account to check his orders. A message in red letters at the top of the in-box page cried out that his account was over quota and no longer able to accept new messages. It was jammed full of hundreds of notices from mail systems at AOL and other ISPs, informing him that addresses in his mailing list did not exist or were otherwise unreachable. Hawke scrolled through the in-box, hoping for some actual orders, but he could find none. He began deleting the bounced messages to make way for legitimate email.

  After trimming his mailing list to avoid remailing the first hundred thousand addresses, Hawke started up Stealth Mail Bomber again and began a new run. As the program chugged along, firing out round after round of email ads, he realized that he'd eventually need a better-targeted list, ideally one consisting of eBay sellers or other Internet users who actually had an interest in doing business online. But he figured he had nothing to lose by sending the Web Manual ad to the rest of his list. After all, he told himself, sending email was essentially free.

  Late the next afternoon, as Hawke was combing through a new batch of undelivered messages in his Yahoo! in-box, the phone rang.[2] Patricia answered it.

  "Someone wants to speak with James Kincaid," she whispered with her hand cupped over the phone's mouthpiece.

  Hawke frowned, got up from his desk, and warily took the phone from her.

  "Hello?"

  "Mr. Kincaid? This is Roger over at InnovaNet," drawled the voice at the other end.

  "Okay ... What can I do for you Roger?"

  "It has come to our attention that your account has been used to send out bulk unsolicited emails."

  Hawke paused. "I don't know anything about any bulk emails," he said innocently.

  "Well, Mr. Kincaid, we have determined that your account was used to send out the emails. We have a policy against that," said Roger.

  Hawke wasn't sure what to say.

  "Have you read our acceptable use policy? It's on our home page," asked Roger.

  "Ah, no, I don't believe I have."

  "Well, I need to inform you that if this happens again we will terminate your account."

  "Okay," Hawke replied slowly.

  "All right then, Mr. Kincaid. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to call. You have a nice day."

  Hawke hung up the phone. He did not like being made to feel guilty, and he was puzzled by the call. Stealth Mail Bomber's instructions specifically promised that the program contained special cloaking code that would make it undetectable by the user's ISP. So how did InnovaNet know he was sending out the ads? Were they
tapping his line somehow? He could have asked Roger, but that would have been an admission of guilt. Hawke decided it was time to begin shopping around for a new ISP.

  * * *

  [1] In a February 2004 telephone interview, Peggy Greenbaum told me Hawke signed up for the credit card as a seventeen-year-old freshman. She said the Greenbaums owe an outstanding balance to Wofford College for their son's final semester, but they refuse to pay it because they believe the college essentially forced Hawke to withdraw without a diploma.

  [2] The outline of this conversation was recounted to me during a January 8, 2004, interview with an InnovaNet employee.

  Shiksaa, the Spammer Tracker

  Though she was a quick study, Shiksaa's first attempts at anti-spamming were fraught with rookie mistakes. On one occasion she angrily LARTed (filed an abuse report about) a company that had sent her spam and was later forced sheepishly to confess to Nanae that she had voluntarily signed up to receive mailings from the firm. Another time a Nanae veteran chewed her out for posting a 700-line message containing the entire contents of a FAQ on spam, rather than just providing a hyperlink to the document. Her tendency to become verbally combative when insulted or threatened also put her at odds with some newsgroup participants. When one of Nanae's resident trolls—a term used to describe newsgroup users who posted messages aimed at annoying other participants—argued once that anti-spammers were akin to the Ku Klux Klan, Shiksaa launched into a vehement counter-attack.