Spam Kings

by McWilliams, Brian S

  When Shiksaa heard the news about the open directory, she surfed to pheromone-labs.com and took a look around for herself. The ordering page caught her eye—it listed QuikSilver Enterprises and a post office box in Montpelier, Vermont. She posted a message on Nanae reminding anti-spammers that QuikSilver was run by Davis Wolfgang Hawke, who was prone to using numerous aliases. She assumed Braden Bournival was one of them.

  When an anti-spammer named Terry announced he had sent an email to Bournival to warn him about the security problem, Shiksaa fired off a quick reply.

  "Why? He's a longtime spammer," she wrote.

  Terry, obviously in awe of her, apologized. "One day I will learn..." he said.

  Soon after the incident, pheromone-labs.com was added to the Spews.org spam blacklist. Because Bournival's domain was actually hosted on a web server operated by Dr. Fatburn, Spews listed the site as part of Fatburn's record. Since early 2002, Hawke and Bournival had been using the Maryland spammer to host some of their sites. They also arranged to use landing pages at Dr. Fatburn's 2002marketing.com site. It was all part of an uneasy truce worked out between Hawke and Fatburn in late 2001. Hawke had agreed to stop ripping off Fatburn's diet pill ads and instead to start sending out spams for Extreme Power Plus (EPP). Hawke's sales of EPP earned Fatburn a commission from Dutch International.

  But the commingling of QuikSilver and Maryland Internet Marketing on Spews meant Dr. Fatburn would often be blamed for Bournival and Hawke's spams for months to come.

  Occasional setbacks didn't dampen Bournival's desire to ratchet up his spam income. He experimented with a variety of different products, quickly dropping those that didn't sell well, such as Quick-Bust, a "breast enhancer." But in time he began to resent the revenue split he had agreed to with Hawke. It seemed increasingly like a tax for being allowed to use Hawke's merchant account. Bournival was able to convince Hawke to lower his cut of Bournival's sales to just 20 percent. But the younger spammer wanted even more for himself.

  When Bournival turned eighteen in April 2002, he celebrated by registering his own trade name—Basic Internet Marketing Services—with the New Hampshire Secretary of State. Then he signed up for his own credit card merchant account. Now he was able to capture all of the profits from any spam he sent, without Hawke knowing. To prevent his mentor from becoming suspicious, Bournival continued to do the occasional mailing for Hawke and even began handling some of his order fulfillment—packing up and shipping out bottles of diet pills and other products. That way, Hawke would continue to provide him with mailing lists and other benefits.

  Bournival had an explanation ready if Hawke ever discovered he was being double-crossed: You're the one who preaches that a person's first concern should be himself. I'm only doing what you taught me, or what you would have done yourself in my shoes.[1]

  During his visits to Pawtucket, Bournival had seen how Hawke was capable of manipulating the people around him. Michael Clark, the Rhode Island high school chess star, was totally under Hawke's spell, even mimicking his mannerisms. Hawke had also gotten Mauricio Ruiz under his thumb by paying Ruiz's rent and otherwise helping him out financially. Even when he was socializing with people, Hawke was always in charge, with everyone else just along for the ride. Bournival promised himself he would never let Hawke control him in that way.

  That June of 2002, Bournival discovered what would become his breakout product. Certified Natural Laboratories (formerly Internet Product Distributors), the Kansas firm that had been supplying him with pheromones, informed him that it had developed a new supplement. The primary ingredient of Maxaman was the aphrodisiac and stimulant yohimbe, but Certified wasn't going to market the product like previous herbal Viagra alternatives. Instead, Certified would position Maxaman as a penis-enlargement pill.

  Certified Natural provided Bournival with sample ad copy that claimed Maxaman could increase a man's penis size by 25 percent. The pills accomplished this, according to the ad, by boosting blood flow to the penis, "thus expanding the sponge-like erectile tissue in the penis, leading to size gains in both length and thickness." Maxaman worked its magic fairly quickly, according to Certified. After taking Maxaman for three to eight weeks, "you should be able to notice an increase in thickness in both erect and flaccid states, as well as an overall increase in length." Noting that "a recent survey showed that 68% of women are unsatisfied with the size of their partner's penis," the ad included a helpful chart that depicted "the most recent data on penis size. See how you measure up!"

  None of this information appeared at Certified Natural's web site about Maxaman. The site simply described the product as a "male-muscle boosting system" and delicately suggested Maxaman enabled men to "enhance their anatomy without dangerous surgery." The site made no specific promises about size gains, nor did it include instructions that appeared in the ad about "how to measure your penis size correctly."

  Bournival wasn't bothered by the discrepancies, which suggested Certified Natural was wary of making fraudulent claims but didn't mind if its spammers did. Bournival was just happy to add a new product to his mix, and he began spamming for Maxaman using Certified Natural's ad copy. Bournival added hyperlinks in the messages to send traffic to special landing pages he rented at Dr. Fatburn's 2002marketing.com site and at a couple other sites Bournival and Hawke had previously set up with an ISP in China. Bournival paid around five dollars per bottle and sold them for twenty-five dollars each, plus a hefty seven-dollar shipping charge.

  Since the Certified Natural ad was in HTML format, the language used to render web pages, it was relatively big, so some recipients might not be able to view it properly in their email. So Bournival decided he needed a plain-text version as well. He had always admired Hawke's copywriting skills, and in July he asked his mentor to pen a new Maxaman ad.

  At the time, Hawke was on cruise control. Through much of 2002 he had been lackadaisically spamming diet pills and the Banned CD and coasting off the commissions from Bournival's pheromone sales. The two had long ago agreed not to encroach on each other's product lines, and Hawke considered Bournival's move into penis pills a minor violation of that deal. Hawke had abandoned V-Force after a couple mailings in February 2002 and had sporadically spammed Pro-Erex, another herbal Viagra product, for a few months after that. Nonetheless, he was flattered by the request and ended up producing a gem of an ad for Bournival. Hawke's ad opened with the provocative line, "Sex is like fixing your '69 Corvette...":

  ...You better use the right tool for the job or it'll be a disaster! The genetic lottery determines your penis size the instant you're conceived—*POOF* that's all you're getting! But that's all about to change, thanks to modern science! Finally, a real formula has been designed to make IT bigger...FOREVER! No painful pumps or exercises are required! Just take a "Maxaman" pill with meals and watch it grow to amazing dimensions!

  Hawke's ad for Maxaman promised full refunds to users who didn't see two inches of growth. He also wrote some bogus testimonials, such as one from "Lauren from Newark NJ," who said that her boyfriend had started taking Maxaman when she was away on vacation. "When I got back a week and a half later, he told me he had a surprise for me. And boy what a surprise it was!"

  Hawke concluded the ad by inviting men to give their mates a similar treat: "Think about how you'll feel when she cries out your name during sex, or after it's over and she hugs you like she's never hugged you before. So place your order now! She will love you for it."

  Spammers had been hawking penis pills for several years before Bournival discovered the niche. But he found that the marketplace was nowhere near saturation. Orders for Maxaman started pouring in, with response rates running near three per thousand emails delivered. Bournival decided to hit hard, and he mailed run after run of both the HTML and plain-text ads.

  By the end of the summer, he could barely fill the orders fast enough, and nearly every inch of floor space in his mother's apartment was occupied with cartons of pills and packing material. He hired his
26-year-old stepsister to help him with shipping and paid her seventy-five cents for each order she packed. It worked out to about twenty dollars per hour. Sometimes his mother pitched in as well.

  In October 2002, Bournival added a third Maxaman ad to his spam runs. He stole the ad copy—which opened with the question, "Want a big penis?"—from a message that arrived in his in-box from a spammer advertising Vig-RX, a competing penis-enlargement product from Leading Edge Marketing, a firm based in the Bahamas that also did business as Albion Medical.

  The ad featured some of the most audacious language of any spam he'd seen. It described Vig-RX as a "doctor-approved pill" that provided "up to three full inches" of penis growth. "You'll radiate confidence and success whenever you enter a locker room, and other men will look at you with real envy," promised the Vig-RX ad. The spam then graphically detailed how women enjoy large penises, but concluded with this warning: "Remember, a penis larger than 9" may be too large for most women. But if for some reason you need even more, it is possible for you to safely continue taking Vig-Rx. The choice is up to you..."

  In his haste to try out the Vig-RX ad copy in his own Maxaman spams, Bournival neglected to replace all occurrences of the word "Vig-RX" and even left in place a hyperlink to the Vig-RX spammer's web site.

  But it hardly mattered. Orders for Maxaman continued to roll in. With his penis-pill profits, Bournival upgraded his network connection, adding a T1 line to the apartment, which enabled him to pump out ads even faster. He also bought his first car, a used Dodge Intrepid that he paid for with $5,000 in cash. For years he had been addicted to car-racing video games, and he finally had his own wheels. The Intrepid would be the first of a collection of muscle cars Bournival would buy with his spam income.

  Meanwhile, Hawke devoted a good chunk of time during the summer of 2002 to updating the The Spambook, which he renamed The Bulkbook and sold for thirty dollars. The revised edition included a new section, "The Mindset," that described the temperament required to be a successful spammer:

  If you are bothered by complaints or easily swayed, then you should stop reading this immediately and find another plan for making money. You will encounter a large number of unpleasant responses to your emails and hostile consumers who are not at all happy about finding junk email in their Inbox on Sunday morning. But you must rise above these complaints and remember that spamming is essentially GOOD for the consumer. Dealing with the negative reaction to your emails will be much easier if you are confident about the product you are selling. As long as you are offering a quality product at a fair price, there is nothing to feel guilty about, no matter what the reaction to your emails.

  According to The Bulkbook, losing a site due to spamming complaints was the biggest problem facing bulkers:

  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-pr
ocessing 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 account—in 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.[2]

  "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 commission—something 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.