Spam Kings

by McWilliams, Brian S

  "They'll do anything they can, they'll do anything to stop a bulk email," Vale told Harnisch.

  Vale hated the meddlesome anti-spammers in Nanae who whined about his spam to the FDA and the Federal Trade Commission, and he blamed them for getting his sites disconnected by ISPs. Vale also held anti-spammers partly responsible for the lawsuit filed against him in late 1998 by America Online. The online service calculated that it had received over 47,000 complaints about Vale's spam since December 1997. Many of the junk emails bore phony AOL return addresses.

  But Vale was defiant. When AOL dispatched someone to his house to serve him with the lawsuit—the Sunday before Christmas no less—Vale just threw the papers back in the man's face. After that, Vale completely ignored all of the legal proceedings and went right on spamming AOL members.

  Exasperated, AOL's legal counsel assumed Vale thought he was above the law. A year later, in December 1999, they convinced a magistrate to award AOL $600,000 in damages and a permanent injunction that barred Vale and Christian Brothers from using AOL's network in the future. So far, AOL's attorneys hadn't tried to force him to pay the money. They seemed content just to keep him away from their service.

  It was not at all like Jason Vale to walk away from a fight. As a teenager, he had been a master of the preemptive punch. Although it cost him a knocked-out tooth and a twice-broken nose, fighting was so much more effective than trying to reason with someone. But against the anti-spammers, Vale's pile-driver right wasn't of much use. He couldn't get to them. Antis hid behind their computers, using words to jab at him and other bulk emailers. They had taken to calling him the Cyanide Idiot in their Nanae postings, referring to one of the active ingredients in Laetrile. Some even left messages on his answering machine complaining about his spam. Their voices sounded effeminate to him. "Most anti-spammers are gay," Vale wrote to Frederick, an anti-spammer, in a May 1999 exchange.

  A few months before the AOL lawsuit, Vale had annoyed spam-tracking antis with a new technique for driving customers to his sites. Instead of directly revealing the site addresses, such as apricotsfromgod.com and canceranswer.com, in his email ads—which would have made him an easy target for complaints—Vale's spams encouraged recipients to visit the AltaVista search engine and type the words "apricot seeds" and "cancer." Because Vale had hidden in his pages' source code terms like Laetrile, B17, apricot seeds, cancer, holistic, and other keywords, his sites would come out at the top of the search rankings.

  Vale's technique was even cited in an October 1999 article in the Industry Standard, which Shiksaa saw when someone posted excerpts from the article to Nanae. After reading about it, Shiksaa decided to pay Vale a little visit online. She dug up his Cianide70 screen name and contacted him over AOL Instant Messenger.

  "Why do you spam, and why are you vindictive against people who complain when you spam them?" she asked.

  "You should just hit delete," replied Vale, not sure who she was.

  "I refuse to click delete," she said. "I will complain about every single spam I get."

  Vale didn't understand why antis got so worked up about spam, which he considered to be no different than paper-based junk mail.

  "There are other more important things in life that one should spend their time concerned with," he said.

  "You didn't answer my question...why do you spam?"

  Vale tried to dodge the question with a rare gesture of peacemaking. "If you want to give me your address," he said, "I'll send you a free video and a pound of apricot seeds just cause you were nice."

  "What would I do with apricot seeds?" Shiksaa asked, after thanking him.

  "When you see the video your life will be changed."

  But Shiksaa signed off without giving him her address.

  By the time Harnisch finally wrapped up the deposition, it was quarter to two. Vale agreed to provide the government with a list of all of his web sites, their traffic stats, and documents showing his income from the Christian Brothers business dating back to 1996.

  But on Easter Sunday 2000, before he'd even had a chance to pull the information together, and just as he was getting ready for church, Vale got a call from a Wall Street Journal reporter. She told him the government had convinced a judge to shut him down with an injunction. District Judge John Gleeson had issued an order that prohibited Vale from selling Laetrile, even in the form of apricot seeds.

  "What do you think about that?" the reporter asked.

  "I respect the court. I respect Judge Gleeson," he said.

  Vale told her he still thought B17 and apricots seeds were not illegal, but he said he would abide by the court's decision. The next day, he removed the banned products from the ordering sections of his web sites. But he kept the rest of the pages online and added one soliciting donations to his legal fund.

  Jason Vale wasn't planning to give up without a fight.

  * * *

  [1] From a transcript of the April 14, 2000, deposition on file with the U.S. District Court for New York's eastern district.

  Hawke Concedes to an Anti

  In the spring of 2000, Davis Hawke decided it was time to get out of South Carolina. In March, he and Patricia moved to Leicester, North Carolina. They were still living in a mobile home, but now they had the Smoky Mountains right outside their door.

  The charm of Chesnee had long since worn off, but there was another factor motivating Hawke's move. An Internet user in California—no one Hawke had ever heard of—had sent him a certified letter saying he was suing Hawke for spamming. The first thing Hawke did after they settled into the trailer on Serenity Lane in Leicester was to visit an attorney in Asheville. Hawke figured the lawsuit was a joke, but he wanted a professional opinion. The lawyer told him he could probably ignore the legal threat, but he advised Hawke to incorporate his Internet marketing company. That way Hawke could shield himself from personal liability should someone lob a more serious lawsuit his way.

  On that day, March 14, 2000, QuikSilver Enterprises, Inc. became a North Carolina corporation. The next day, Hawke was blasting out his first barrage of spams bearing his new company name. But to keep nosy people off his back, Hawke continued to use his post office box in South Carolina as Quiksilver's mailing address. He'd make the hour-long drive from Leicester to Spartanburg a couple times each week just to gather up any checks or other mail that might have arrived.

  Hawke had given up on trying to conceal the origin of his spams by routing them through open mail relays. Instead, he signed up for several accounts using bogus names at ISPs such as Blue Ridge Internet in Hendersonville, Internet of Asheville, or even BellSouth's Internet service. He paid his twenty dollars, sent a couple spam runs, and almost invariably the ISP would cut off service once it got complaints about his junk email. Hawke just chalked up the disposable dial-up accounts as a cost of doing business.

  Hawke's desire for a fresh start was also prompted by a series of other business problems the previous winter. In December, bidders on his eBay auctions started leaving negative comments in the feedback section of the auction site. They complained that Venture Alpha, as he had called his online auction business, was slow to mail out products and that emails to it sometimes bounced as undeliverable. Other winning bidders said the stuff he shipped out didn't match the photos they had seen in his auction listings.

  The negative feedback was frustrating to Hawke, who had been careful to keep the wheels of e-commerce well greased by soliciting positive comments from bidders. Whenever he shipped out a knife, belt buckle, or any other item to one of his eBay customers, he sent a note requesting that the bidder leave positive feedback for him in the auction site's forum. In turn, he agreed to recommend the buyer. That way, whenever a potential bidder looked at Venture Alpha's member profile at the site, they'd see all the positive comments and feel reassured about doing business with him.

  But as Hawke's sales volume grew, the complaints also started to pile up. In late December, a former customer posted a warning to buyers on the
rec.knife Usenet newsgroup. "Stay away from these people they are nothing but thieves," wrote the man. "I won one of their auctions for a set of kamas ... I received the item seven weeks later! They auction things they don't have in stock and wait until they get your money in hand to order it! The quality of the item was terrible too."

  The same day, eBay unceremoniously suspended Hawke's account. But he was not about to abandon the business he had come to know so well. So Hawke decided to move up the food chain and start marketing himself as an eBay auction expert. He pulled together some ideas he had seen on the Internet along with some of his own tips into a ten-page document he titled the "The EBay Home Study Course." Available only in electronic format, it walked beginners though how to choose a market niche and how to write a sales pitch. It also included details on the use of photos to spice up auction listings and advice on setting up a complementary web site. The manual even had a section on why getting positive comments from bidders is important.

  "You need to have an outstanding feedback rating brimming with positive comments to really make huge profits on eBay," Hawke wrote. But he also advised auctioneers on how to deal with what he called "rogue customers" who simply can't be satisfied. "We all know that the customer is NOT always right...If they persist in causing problems, just ignore them."

  The eBay manual sold fairly well. But a new Hawke venture, which he called the Banned CD, became his cash cow after moving to North Carolina. According to the spams he composed, the CD-ROM contained software programs and "contraband" information that would "teach you things that Uncle Sam, your creditors, your boss, and others just don't want you to know."

  Hawke loaded the CDs with an assortment of documents he had picked up on the Internet, such as instructions on how to build a cable-TV descrambler and a directory of suppliers of explosives, silencers, and other weaponry. He also threw in a list of twenty-five million email addresses, along with a copy of a spamming program. The CD also contained a number of freeware utilities such as computer screensavers and clip art collections.

  For twenty dollars, Hawke considered the Banned CD a bargain, and many customers seemed to agree. But the Banned CD spams also generated more complaints than any of Hawke's previous offerings.

  In June 2000, a flood of Banned CD ads found their way into the email in-box of Reid Walker, who operated a taxi business out of his home in Crestview, Florida.

  Walker had recently bought a $250 box called a WebTV that turned his television into a big computer monitor. He could sit on the couch with the unit's wireless keyboard, dial up the Internet through the box's internal modem, and look at eBay auctions or check his email between phone calls dispatching rides or handling other business details.

  Walker's WebTV email account had a limited storage quota, and the unit had no CD-ROM drive, so he had absolutely no interest in the barrage of Banned CD ads. More than thirty arrived over the course of a week or two.

  After Walker got the first couple of messages, he did the first thing most consumers do: complain to their ISP. WebTV admitted that its spam filter wasn't 100 percent effective and conceded that individual users couldn't customize it to block selected spams. There wasn't much WebTV could do. So Walker followed the instructions at the bottom of the Banned CD ad.

  "This is a 100-percent opt-in list...we immediately honor all requests to be removed," promised the ad. So Walker replied, asking to be taken off the list. But his message was returned as undeliverable. The next day, more copies of the spam arrived, this time with a new return address, and a slightly reworked message:

  I have been receiving emails saying that I'm contributing to the moral decay of society by selling the Banned CD. That may be, but I feel strongly that you have a right to benefit from this hard-to-find information. So I am giving you ONE LAST CHANCE to order the Banned CD!

  "And you just had your last chance to stop emailing me," Walker wrote back, fuming. But once again, his message bounced back undelivered.[2]

  Growing more annoyed by the minute, Walked decided to visit 4publish.com, the web site advertised in the Banned CD spams. He was hoping to locate a phone number or other contact information.

  "Remove my email from your distribution list," he wrote in a customer comment input form on 4publish.com.

  But a few days later, in a third salvo, more ads for the Banned CD arrived in Walker's in-box. Now furious, Walker wrote in the input form at the site, "YOU CAN ALSO BE JAILED FOR SPAMMING! WHICH I AM DOING EVERYTHING I CAN TO GET YOU TRACKED DOWN. QUIT SENDING ME THIS SHIT...IS THAT PLAIN ENOUGH FOR YOU?"

  To further drive home his point, Walker sent the message over and over again. He ended up sending over one hundred copies of the message by repeatedly cutting and pasting the text into the form and hitting the submit button.

  Without identifying himself, Hawke replied less than an hour later.

  "Since you see fit to mail bomb me and harass me like this, I am never, ever, ever going to remove you from this list," wrote Hawke using the email account resalehighway@resalehighway.com. "In fact, I am going to distribute your email address and phone number to as many telemarketing companies and spamming companies that I know, who will in turn sell that info to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other direct sales businesses like mine. Have fun!"

  And then, a few minutes later, Hawke sent another message: "And no, asshole, I can't be jailed for spamming. Read the federal laws. It is a civil offense whereby you can sue me for $500 per message. I make $25,000 each weekend doing this. It will cost you more than $500 just to hire a good civil attorney. Go for it pal. I can afford it!"

  Walker's comment about sending Hawke to jail had been a bluff. To his knowledge, there was no federal law prohibiting junk email. But he was astounded by the spammer's defiance and wondered whether there was a way to combat him. He decided to post a message on Usenet, where he had gotten good advice in the past about fishing and vacation questions.

  "Can anyone help?" he asked on June 26, 2000, in a newsgroup called alt.spam.

  An anti-spammer named Peter promptly came to Walker's aid. He looked up the domain registration record for resalehighway.com. Peter told Walker that the site was registered to a Winston Cross in Spartanburg, South Carolina, who listed an email address of hawkedw@charter.net.

  On Peter's suggestion, Walker emailed a complaint to Charter Communications, the cable company that provided Cross's Internet account, as well as to Blueberry Hill Communications, the California ISP listed in the domain record as the host for resalehighway.com. On both complaints, Walker sent a carbon copy to Cross's charter.net address.

  Peter warned Walker not to expect a quick response and said that ISPs sometimes need to be reminded before they take action. But just the next day, Walker received a terse email from Cross, a.k.a. Hawke. "You're on the remove list, punk. You won't receive any more ads," wrote the reluctantly repentant spammer. Walker was jubilant.

  Hawke expected the incident would result in resalehighway.com being shut down. But the site remained online and stayed nearly bulletproof to anti-spammer complaints for nearly a year. It even escaped a nomination to the Mail Abuse Prevention System blacklist. That June, another Internet user who had received Hawke's Banned CD ads posted a complaint to Nanae. He said that MAPS's operators had declined his nomination on the grounds that selling spamware was not sufficient reason to blockade the site. In reply, anti-spammer Alan Murphy agreed the site's IP address should be blacklisted, but he advised the user that there wasn't much more he could do. "Move on to the next target," wrote Murphy.

  After reading the complaints about MAPS's inaction regarding resalehighway.com, Shiksaa did some brief poking around at Hawke's site. She might have put more time into investigating the site and its operator, but the following day a much bigger object appeared on the Nanae radar.

  * * *

  [2] From a March 12, 2004, interview with Reid Walker.

  A Date with a Spam Queen

  The newsgroup was abuzz with word that someone had appare
ntly hacked into the computers of a Tennessee spam operation known as Premier Services, downloaded over one hundred megabytes of data, and posted some of the juicier tidbits at a site he entitled Behind Enemy Lines.

  "If you are an anti-spammer looking for an inside peek at the world of spamming, you have just found Fort Knox!" wrote the hacker, who identified himself only as "The Man in the Wilderness."

  The hacker's site included scores of pages of chat logs and emails between Premier Services's employees and customers. The messages detailed a variety of shady practices, including pump-and-dump stock scams and AOL password-stealing schemes. The hacker's site, originally hosted at an ad-supported service called FreeWebSites.com, also included an assortment of partially nude photos of some of the company's principals.

  Prior to that day in June 2000, Premier Services and its owner, 35-year-old Rodona Garst, were unknown to most anti-spammers. But they would soon become the most notorious instance of retaliatory hacking since Hacker-X targeted Sanford Wallace.

  According to the Man in the Wilderness's account of events, he had been the victim of a type of online fraud referred to by anti-spammers as a Joe-job. In early 2000, Garst had forged his domain name in the return address of one of Premier Services's spam runs. As a result of the Joe-job, the hacker's mail server was besieged by thousands of error messages generated by undeliverable addresses on Garst's mailing list. The hacker also received complaints from inexperienced anti-spammers who thought he was responsible for Premier's spam. The Man in the Wilderness said he contacted the ISP Garst had used to send the messages, and the provider responded by canceling Premier's account.

  "For the spammer responsible, this was warning shot number one," wrote the Man in the Wilderness in Behind Enemy Lines.

  But Garst subsequently sent two more spam runs through different accounts, both of which again used the hacker's domain in their return address.