Spam Kings

by McWilliams, Brian S

  After his quick success with pheromones, Hawke decided to try another product in the herbal-pharmaceutical niche. At the time, diet pills were all the rage with many bulk mailers, but Hawke was justifiably cautious. The U.S. government had already shown its willingness to prosecute online marketers of weight-loss products. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had been running a sting called Operation Waistline. As part of the FTC's crackdown, seven companies had agreed in 1997 to pay a total of nearly a million dollars to settle charges of deceptive practices.

  The agency followed up in 1999 with an unusual program to educate Internet users about online scams. The FTC mocked up a convincing web page for a fake weight-loss product called NoriCaLite. The ads promised to help users shed thirty pounds in a month. But clicking the site's ordering link pulled up an FTC-created page with the title "You Could Get Scammed!" It warned users to resist "the false and deceptive advertising claims made by many so-called 'weight-loss' products."

  Still, by 2001 the Internet remained awash with ads for diet pills. Even eBay was full of them. During a visit to the auction site Hawke noticed a particular glut of ads for an herbal weight-loss product called Extreme Power Plus. The pills sold for thirteen dollars per bottle and contained a mixture of over a dozen herbs. The active weight-loss ingredient was ma huang, a Chinese herbal stimulant also known as ephedra. The pills were being offered by distributors working for a company in Louisiana called Dutch International Products. Dutch had built a multilevel scheme to market Extreme Power Plus and a handful of other herbal remedies, including Extreme Colon Cleanser and Extreme Coral Calcium.

  Hawke had no desire to be a foundation stone in a pyramid scheme. But he was eager to try spamming diet pills. So he made arrangements to purchase some in bulk from Peak Nutrition, a supplier in Syracuse, Nebraska. In place of ma huang, Peak's weight-loss pills contained what it called lipotropic fat burners. The ingredients supposedly produced none of the jitteriness and other side effects of ephedra. Hawke ordered a couple of cases of the ninety-tablet bottles and started working on an ad.

  To speed things up, Hawke went to eBay and downloaded a web page containing the auction listing for Dutch International's Extreme Power Plus. He made a few customizations to the ad, such as in pricing. He charged twenty-nine dollars per bottle, almost a twenty-five-dollar premium over what Peak charged him. Hawke also added hyperlinks that would take buyers to his ordering site. To capitalize on the work others had already done promoting the brand, he swapped out the words Extreme Power Plus with a name confusingly similar: Power Diet Plus.

  The original ads had included testimonials from satisfied Extreme Power Plus customers, which Hawke modified only slightly. This led to some contradictions with the rest of his ad that Hawke overlooked. In one testimonial, a happy Power Diet Plus user named Sheryl told how her doctor proclaimed that ma huang was perfectly safe. Yet higher up in the ad, Hawke boasted that Power Diet Plus, unlike "the other stuff," doesn't contain the stimulant.

  In April of 2001, Hawke fired off his first batch of spams for Power Diet Plus. "Lose 80 pounds by June GUARANTEED! #1 Diet Pill!" they said. What Hawke didn't know as he pushed the send button was that he was about to stomp on the toes of George Alan Moore, Jr., a Dutch International Distributor.

  Moore lived in Linthicum, Maryland, and referred to himself as "Dr. Fatburn." He had been selling Extreme Power Plus via eBay and his own web site, UltimateDiets.com, for a couple of years. Unbeknownst to Hawke, Dr. Fatburn had hidden a digital watermark in the source code of the web page Hawke had copied from eBay. To prevent other eBay sellers from stealing his ad copy, Dr. Fatburn had inserted the words "This diet ad is property of UltimateDiets.com" in white-on-white text in several places within the ad. When casually viewed with most web page editors, or with an email software program such as Microsoft Outlook, the watermark was invisible. But it was plain to see for anyone who scoured the source code of the ad.

  Anti-spammers often examined the source code of spammer web sites and email messages in their quest for clues, and they were quick to notice the reference to UltimateDiets.com in Hawke's ads. As copies of Hawke's Power Diet Plus ads began showing up in their email inboxes, some fired off complaints to the Florida ISP hosting Dr. Fatburn's site. In turn, the ISP forwarded the messages to Dr. Fatburn.

  Prior to selling diet pills online, Dr. Fatburn had made money through occupations such as delivering pizzas and selling collectible sports cards and autographs. His new weight-loss business was doing nicely, and he intended to keep it that way. In the eighteen-plus months that he had been marketing diet pills, Dr. Fatburn had never resorted to bulk email. That's not to say he hadn't contemplated it. In 2000 he purchased on eBay a bulk-emailing program capable of sending 100,000 messages per hour. But Dr. Fatburn didn't use it. He stayed with his strategy to build a network of downline distributors by word of mouth and by discreetly placing messages in newsgroups such as alt.entrepreneurs and alt.make.money.fast.

  But now, some guy was ripping off his ad copy and getting Dr. Fatburn unfairly branded as a spammer to boot.

  Using the email address listed in QuikSilver's spams, Dr. Fatburn sent a message warning the company to stop stealing his ads. But he never heard back, and QuikSilver continued to send out messages using the same ad copy. So Dr. Fatburn decided to do some reconnaissance: he placed an order for QuikSilver's Power Diet Plus. When the package arrived, the bottle inside was labeled "Peak Nutrition Lipotropic Fat Burners." He realized there was no such thing as Power Diet Plus. QuikSilver hadn't even arranged for private labeling; it was just selling Peak's house brand.

  Dr. Fatburn located a phone number for Peak Nutrition and managed to reach one of the owners. He told her QuikSilver had ripped him off, and he wanted to know who was behind the company.

  "They're using a copyrighted ad and can be sued for that," he said.

  But the woman from Peak just gave him the brush-off. She refused to disclose who operated QuikSilver, although she agreed to bring up the matter of the advertisement when she had a chance. It was obvious to Dr. Fatburn that Peak was protecting QuikSilver because Hawke was making money for Peak.

  In later spam runs QuikSilver used the same basic ad, modifying only the return address and the web site address for ordering. By August, Dr. Fatburn decided it was time for a change in tactics. He dusted off his bulk-mailing program and sent out his first salvo of spams for Extreme Power Plus. In a subtle jab at QuikSilver, he used the subject line "Finally A Product That Lives Up To Its Name." Like the ad QuikSilver had ripped off, Dr. Fatburn's message included a description of the product along with testimonials from customers. But Dr. Fatburn added a bonus QuikSilver didn't have. If shoppers ordered within forty-eight hours, they'd get a free trial pack of Extreme Colon Cleanser.

  It was Dr. Fatburn's first foray into spam, but you'd never know it from the techniques he used to keep anti-spammers from reporting the spam to his ISP. The hyperlink to his ordering site was obfuscated, so that instead of the legible domain name (in this case, his site freecableland.com), it showed only a series of numbers. Rather than including his regular email as the message's return address, Dr. Fatburn used an account he had specially set up at Yahoo!. Then, for the message's "return path" header—the address to which bounces and other error messages would go—he listed an account he had created with a free email service in Poland.

  But despite these stealthy spamming tricks, Dr. Fatburn did something junk emailers almost never do: all of his spams included his real name and home-office phone number. It wasn't out of naïveté or an oversight. Dr. Fatburn considered himself an honest businessman and wanted customers to know that his company, Maryland Internet Marketing, was on the up and up. Only time would tell whether the calculated gamble would give him a competitive edge against spammers such as QuikSilver.

  But one thing was certain. Hawke was on his way to earning a reputation among other junk emailers as a scammer.

  * * *

  [1] An unidentified anti-s
pammer celebrated the turn of events by providing Shiksaa with a new graphic for Chickenboner.com. It was a parody of the DVD case for the movie Gladiator. The anti-spammer had replaced actor Russell Crowe's head with an image of Hawke's, taken from a newspaper article about his neo-Nazi days. The title of the movie had been changed to "Spaminator."

  David D'Amato, the Titanic Spammer

  In early 2001, anti-spammer Rob Mitchell continued to watch tickling fetishist and spammer Terri DiSisto's online activities out of the corner of his eye. When he did mention DiSisto, he referred to him as "Terrance." But Mitchell had almost given up hope that the law would ever catch up to the strange spammer.

  Then, in March of 2001, Mitchell got a phone call from Reader's Digest reporter Hal Karp. The reporter told him that federal prosecutors in Massachusetts had quietly announced a plea agreement with David P. D'Amato, a guidance counselor and assistant principal at West Hempstead High School on Long Island.

  The 39-year-old D'Amato had pled guilty to misdemeanor charges of email bombing computers at Suffolk University in Boston and James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The U.S. Attorney's press release didn't mention D'Amato's Terri DiSisto persona or the spams for videos. But Karp assured Mitchell the feds had found their man and said D'Amato was facing up to a year in prison and fines of over $100,000 on each count, with sentencing scheduled for July.

  Mitchell surfed to the West Hempstead High web site. There, at the top of the home page, was D'Amato's name. As an educator himself, Mitchell was aghast at the thought of a sadistic spammer and online harasser like D'Amato working in schools most of his adult life.

  "Such a person should never be in charge of children in any capacity ever again," wrote Mitchell at his Project Iceberg site.

  Newsday, a daily paper serving the greater New York metropolitan area, was among the first to publish a photograph of D'Amato. Taken from the West Hempstead High yearbook, the photo showed the plump, unsmiling assistant principal seated in his office. D'Amato's balding pate and jowls made him look older than his years.

  "Ewwww. He looks like Truman Capote," was Shiksaa's response after Mitchell posted a link to the photograph on Nanae.

  Karen Hoffmann chimed in as well when she saw the photo: "MY GOD, could he have been any uglier?"

  Another anti-spammer used the image to create a parody playbill for the movie Titanic, which Shiksaa posted at her site Chickenboner.com. It showed D'Amato's head, juxtaposed with the female image of Terri DiSisto above the luxury ocean liner. Superimposed over the ship were the words "Titanic Spammer" and "A Rob Mitchell Film."

  Even Rebecca Ore, who had originally expressed skepticism about Mitchell's obsession with DiSisto, had come around. She encouraged victims to travel to Boston for D'Amato's sentencing. "All that's remaining is for people who want to see him do active time to show up and let the judge know how much damage he did," she said.

  To the amazement of Mitchell and many other people following the case, D'Amato continued to work at West Hempstead High for nearly two weeks after signing the plea agreement. The school district suspended D'Amato only after Three Village Times, the hometown paper, acted on a tip from Karp and confronted school officials about D'Amato. They admitted they had heard nothing about the charges until that point.

  Karp suspected that D'Amato's attorneys had negotiated a deal to tone down the government's press release and to keep it devoid of sensational details. Clearly, D'Amato was getting good legal representation. D'Amato's father, George, was the head of a big Wall Street law firm. And his lawyer, Tracy A. Miner, was one of the top defense lawyers around and president of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

  Karp concluded that George D'Amato was financially supporting his son, who lived in a swanky penthouse in Garden City, New York, well beyond the means of most public-school administrators.

  When FBI agents raided the apartment in June of 2000, D'Amato admitted he was DiSisto and detailed how he performed the mail-bomb attacks. He said he used CyberCreek's Avalanche software to send the messages through open mail relays. He also admitted to registering numerous post office boxes and telephone numbers under false names as part of his tickling video schemes. Later, in a hearing held at the time of his plea bargain, D'Amato told the court he had been under the care of a psychiatrist since January of 2000 for Internet addiction and job-related stress.

  The Three Village Times article revealed that D'Amato had submitted his resignation to the school months prior to being exposed as Terri DiSisto. He had planned to leave in order to attend law school the coming autumn at his father's alma mater, Fordham. The news troubled Mitchell. Impersonating lawyers was one of the tricks DiSisto had used to scare off anti-spammers and others who complained about his spamming and abuse.

  "A more unfit person to enter the legal profession I cannot imagine," concluded Mitchell in Project Iceberg.

  Fordham Law School apparently reached a similar conclusion following D'Amato's sentencing in July 2001.

  At the hearing, D'Amato stood up and addressed the court: "Your honor, I would like to express my remorse and sorrow." He apologized to his parents, who were present, and to "every person in this courtroom who may have been impacted." D'Amato pleaded to the court for "mercy and compassion."

  Prosecutors had provided the judge with a small stack of letters from DiSisto's online victims. The letters were gathered by Charles Dirksen, a San Francisco attorney and regular participant in the rec.music.phish newsgroup, who had put out an online call for testimony on behalf of prosecutors.

  "I realize there are (inarguably) far more important things to get excited about these days...than putting a twisted, deviant spammer in jail for a year or two," Dirksen wrote in an April posting to the newsgroup. "But nevertheless, as Phish fans, we have the chance to help put someone in prison who trashed our online community and harassed, threatened and insulted many of our fellow fans repeatedly and persistently."

  Before sentencing D'Amato, the judge asked whether anyone in the courtroom wished to speak about his or her experiences with the defendant. But no one rose to the occasion—not even Sean Gallagher, the student who had been mail-bombed by DiSisto. He was present in the courtroom but apparently content just to watch the proceedings.

  The lenient sentence finally handed down by the judge disappointed many who had followed the case. Noting that D'Amato had already paid over $20,000 in restitution to Suffolk and James Madison universities, the judge spared D'Amato jail time for his violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Instead, he ordered D'Amato to spend six months in a halfway house. The judge specifically stipulated that D'Amato's incarceration should not interfere with his law school classes or mental health counseling. The order also didn't place any restrictions on D'Amato's Internet use.

  But a wrench was thrown into the works when officials at Fordham, apparently awakened to the controversy surrounding D'Amato, balked and withdrew their offer to admit him. Despite protests from D'Amato's attorney, the judge revised the sentence.

  Instead of spending his days at Fordham's midtown Manhattan campus—just a block from Central Park and the Lincoln Center for the Arts—D'Amato would be booked that August into the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he would stay for three months until being transferred to a medium-security facility in Fairton, New Jersey. D'Amato would serve out the remaining two and a half months of his sentence in Fairton and be released in February of 2002.

  For Mitchell, the conclusion of the case left many questions unresolved, such as how D'Amato had acquired his spamming and mail-bombing skills and whether he worked alone or had accomplices. Similarly, serious doubts remained for Karp about whether investigators had missed evidence of pedophilia in D'Amato's past. The assistant principal's resumé showed him to be a job hopper, having changed schools eight times in eleven years. Karp worried that D'Amato's short stints at each school were the result of his being quietly let go due to misconduct that administrators decided
was best to sweep under a rug, rather than face a lawsuit from D'Amato.

  But those questions would stay unanswered, and Mitchell had to be content with knowing that Terri DiSisto would never again appear online.

  "The era of the Internet presence of Terri DiSisto is at an end, forever," he wrote as the final entry to his Project Iceberg site.

  But then in early August, just days before D'Amato was incarcerated, Mitchell was surprised to receive a rambling email from the man. The message came from an email address he didn't recognize, and the headers showed it was sent from a public library in Brooklyn.[2]

  A history major in college, D'Amato had frequently compared their online battles to those of opposing generals in the American Revolutionary War, and in his message that day he acknowledged that Mitchell had been a worthy opponent.

  "Everything is going to turn out just fine," said the former guidance counselor, noting that he still had his permanent certification from the New York State Education Department.

  Annoyed, Mitchell sent a terse reply stating that he had grown weary of D'Amato's analogies. He said D'Amato seemed in denial about what he had done and what lay ahead of him. But D'Amato apparently had no desire for introspection. He wrote back to say he was disappointed not to see Mitchell at his sentencing in Boston, and he invited Mitchell to meet him someday in New York.

  When Mitchell finally responded, he said he'd try to look up D'Amato if his travels ever took him to the Northeast. But Mitchell never received a reply.

  * * *

  [2] Author interview with "Rob Mitchell" (a pseudonym) on March 23, 2004.

  Chapter 6.