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 Mikes—Clark and Torres—with 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 Bournival—neither admitted to being responsible—also 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.
* * *
[1] Bournival shared this explanation during our May 10, 2004, interview.
[2] From a June 14, 2004, interview with Bournival.
Fighting Dr. Fatburn
Aside from Davis Hawke, Dr. Fatburn had few major problems with his downline distributors or sales affiliates. In 2002, their spams—for diet pills, colon cleanser, and herbal Viagra—helped 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).[3]
"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, week
s 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!"[4]
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 addresses—but 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?"[5]
"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 s
currying 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.
Dr. Fatburn had touched a nerve. Uy's wife, a doctor, had always tolerated Uy's spam fighting, but she didn't like it intruding on their personal lives. Still, Uy held his ground with Fatburn and refused to take down his site.
After the phone call ended in a stalemate, Uy contacted his lawyer for advice. Uy was certain the First Amendment protected his site, but he wanted to be sure.
Lycos, which operated the Tripod home page service, wasn't going to wait around for legal lightning to strike. Responding to a complaint from Dr. Fatburn, on March 5, 2003, Lycos disconnected Uy's site. According to the company, Uy had violated Tripod's Terms and Conditions of Use, which gave Lycos the ability to terminate any site "for any reason or for no reason at all, in Lycos's sole discretion, without prior notice."
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