Spam Kings

by McWilliams, Brian S

  But even though Hawke authorized Mauricio to offer up to $2,000 per week for the woman's services, he returned empty-handed. A determined Hawke then sent Liliana down to Colombia with the same mission. Always more reliable than Mauricio, she quickly lined up a few prospects and emailed photos of the girls to Hawke. After he made his selection, Liliana ran into troubles getting a green card for the young woman. But soon she brought home to Hawke a pretty 19-year-old named Margie.

  Hawke took no pleasure from food—his regimen of tofu, vegetables, and rice was simply a way to sustain his body. Even money was no longer a powerful driving force. All Hawke really cared about that summer was getting laid.[11] And now, he had his very own live-in prostitute.

  Hawke had recently convinced Patricia it was a good time to find her new digs closer to Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where she would begin graduate-level coursework in microbiology at the University of Massachusetts campus there. Hawke paid Patricia's rent at the new place, which was thirty miles from Pawtucket.

  At first, Hawke didn't tell Patricia about his plans for the prostitute. But when he finally revealed the arrangement, she tried to shrug it off. He's just a guy, Patricia told herself. She knew he didn't love the whore.[12]

  * * *

  [9] Copies of spams that were traceable to Hawke and advertising for such lists appeared in the news.admin.net-abuse.sightings newsgoup several times in early 2003.

  [10] Bournival first described Creampie Productions during a May 20, 2004, interview. Ruiz confirmed the general outline of the project in a May 28, 2004, interview over AIM.

  [11] Hawke detailed his utilitarian approach to eating, which he called "the only correct choice," during our May 10, 2004, interview. In the course of the discussion, he said, "I don't eat for pleasure. I only do one thing for pleasure."

  [12] During our May 10, 2004, interview, Bournival said Patricia had told him Hawke's having a prostitute didn't bother her because she knew Hawke didn't have any real affection for the prostitute. But Bournival said he could tell she was upset by Hawke's infidelity.

  Chapter 10.

  The Pinacle Partnership Program

  Margie spoke hardly any English, and Hawke had only a rudimentary command of Spanish. But he wasn't paying her $2,000 a week for her conversation skills. In the first month after Margie arrived in Pawtucket, Hawke made sure he got his money's worth of sex. Even when he was working at his computer, she was on duty. Theirs was a purely professional arrangement; neither was under any illusion that they would fall in love or that Margie would become Hawke's Colombian bride.

  At the time, summer 2003, Hawke was doing relatively little spamming. Instead, he spent most of his time recruiting and directing other spammers to sell Pinacle on commission for Amazing Internet. Using a new alias, "Dave Bridger," he posted want ads at BulkersClub.com and other spamming forums. He also mailed the recruiting ad to a list of several thousand addresses he had harvested from spam sites. The ads invited "real bulkers" to join him in peddling penis-enlargement pills.[1]

  "You'll market a product called Pinacle, an herbal penis enlarger that sells like water in the desert. Everyone wants this stuff; guys buy it for themselves, girls buy it for their guys," said one ad. Hawke claimed some members of his affiliate program were earning $20,000 in commissions each week. "This product pulls a massive amount of sales...All you do is MAIL, MAIL, MAIL. And collect your commission check," promised a later version of the ad.

  Hawke's recruiting ads included the address of a web site, product-zone.com, which offered more information about spamming for Pinacle. The Pinacle Partnership Program site included a demonstration of how affiliates tracked order statistics and commission payments. There was also a greeting from Dave Bridger:

  My goal is simple; to help you make as much money as possible, as fast as possible. The most important thing you can do is mail, mail, mail. The more mail you send, the more sales you will make, which puts more cash in your pocket. I will help you along the way...You will find this is the most profitable, fastest-paying and most reliable sponsorship program for bulk mailers.

  Soon, over 150 people had signed up to become Pinacle sales affiliates. Many appeared to be amateurs or chickenboners, such as the affiliate named Bill whose email address revealed that he operated an ostrich farm. A half dozen Pinacle affiliates were women, including one who called herself "Miss Daisy" and who earned a $1,000 bonus from Hawke for her spamming.[2]

  Some big-league bulkers signed on with "Dave Bridger" as well. Tony Banks mailed for Hawke as Affiliate #31. Banks was listed on the Spamhaus Rokso list as a "criminal spammer" who had been in the business since 1997, but he never managed to pull in many orders for Pinacle. Bruce Connolly, who was on Rokso as a business associate of Louisiana spammer Ronnie Scelson, joined the Pinacle program too. Connolly produced no orders at all, leading Hawke to think he was just doing reconnaissance on Amazing Internet's business.[3]

  But most of Amazing Internet's sales were being generated by the handful of Rhode Islanders whom Hawke had personally recruited. Hawke's Pawtucket tennis buddy, Loay Samhoun, was the company's top affiliate for several weeks running. Mauricio Ruiz spammed in fits and starts, pulling lots of orders when he put his mind to it. Mike Torres and Mike Clark blasted out Pinacle ads in droves as well. And Bournival, who was also handling all the shipping and customer service, kept a steady stream of ads flowing from Amazing's offices in New Hampshire.

  Throughout the summer of 2003, thousands of computer users from all walks of life decided to give Pinacle pills a try. They didn't seem to care that Amazing's sites contained no phone number, mailing address, or even an email address for contacting the company. Or that the Pinacle order form didn't protect customers' data using industry-standard encryption technology. Nor had shoppers apparently bothered to check the FDA web site, which said there was no medical evidence that yohimbe, the active ingredient in Pinacle, actually made penises bigger. (In fact, the FDA warned that yohimbe could be dangerous to people with heart disease and could potentially cause renal failure, seizures, and death.)

  Despite these red flags, most of Amazing's customers ordered two bottles of Pinacle at $49.95 each. (A bottle contained sixty capsules, approximately a month's supply at the recommended dosage of two pills per day.) Among the users of Pinacle was the manager of a $6 billion mutual fund, who asked that his order be shipped to his Park Avenue, New York, office. The president of a California firm that sold airplane parts, who was active in his local rotary club, gave out his American Express card to pay for six bottles, or $300 worth, of Pinacle. A restaurateur in Boulder, Colorado, asked for four bottles. The coach of an elementary school lacrosse club in Pennsylvania also requested four bottles. The president of a credit repair firm wanted three bottles. A soldier in Texas who was a frequent user of bodybuilding products ordered from muscle magazines requested two bottles of Pinacle.[4]

  As orders rolled in, Amazing Internet was soon grossing over $500,000 monthly from Pinacle sales alone. Most of it was profit, since the spammers paid just five dollars per bottle to their wholesaler, Certified Natural, and gave affiliates twenty dollars per order. The company's monthly shipping tab was a couple thousand dollars—more than what Hawke and Bournival had been earning at the start of their spamming careers. And Amazing's rent ($1,600), telecommunications ($7,000), and web-hosting ($1,000) costs only ran about $10,000 per month.

  With his new wealth, Bournival walked into the Hummer dealer in Manchester that summer, picked out a yellow, four-door H2, and paid for it with $54,000 in cash. (He had totaled his Dodge Intrepid in May while drag racing with Mike Clark. Bournival hit a tree outside Goffstown, New Hampshire, going fifty miles per hour but walked away without serious injury.)

  Bournival also moved out of the Montgomery Street apartment and rented his own expansive bachelor pad. The newly built, 5,300-square-foot custom home, located in an upscale suburban neighborhood in Manchester, cost Bournival $3,000 per month in rent.

  But as the summer
stretched on, Amazing Internet hit a few snags. Someone in Washington State used the state's consumer-friendly anti-spam law to file a lawsuit against the company. When Bournival agreed to pay $1,500 to settle the case, Hawke ridiculed him, saying he was encouraging other anti-spammers to try to bleed them dry. But Bournival shrugged off the criticism. He and Hawke were in synch on many business matters, but Bournival didn't share his partner's views on dealing with financial obligations. Hawke bragged that he avoided paying bills whenever he could. Despite his enormous stashes of cash, Hawke routinely missed rent payments and was often overdue on phone and other utility bills. Hawke would even walk out of a restaurant without paying the tab—as long as it wasn't a vegetarian place he planned to frequent.

  Other problems arose that summer when articles appeared on the Internet about Amazing Internet Products and about how its colorful owners were making a small fortune selling penis-enlargement pills.[5] Hawke blamed Bournival for the unwanted publicity. Bournival had carelessly listed his Manchester address and phone number in some of the company's domain registrations. What's more, one of Bournival's old high school friends, whom Bournival had briefly hired as a marketing consultant, spilled the beans to a reporter about Amazing Internet's business practices.[6]

  As a result of the media exposure, an assistant New Hampshire attorney general called Bournival into her office in August for a discussion. But the state took no action against Amazing Internet Products, other than ordering the company to provide refunds to a couple customers who had complained.[7]

  Still, Hawke warned Bournival that he was generally being too flashy. Even the license plate on his Hummer, which said "Cashola," cried out for attention. But Hawke had created his own set of problems for the partnership. Mostly through laziness rather than his tendency to stiff creditors, Hawke sometimes fell behind in paying sales affiliates. He also made some enemies in the spam underground when he began selling lists of email addresses and open proxies, with customer satisfaction well short of ideal. Hawke also angered the developers of two spamware programs when he began marketing "cracked," or unauthorized, copies of the software to other spammers.

  In his private emails to affiliates and other spammers, Hawke usually didn't go through the trouble of routing his messages through a proxy. As a result, the Internet protocol address of his cable modem was easily discernable in the email message's headers. At one point during the summer, someone remotely hacked into one of his computers. Fortunately, the PC contained little more than software, mailing lists, and some personal photos.[8]

  By December of 2003, sales of Pinacle began to stall rapidly. Hawke and Bournival assumed it was partly due to consumers losing interest in the product. So they scrambled to line up new items to sell, such as a portable lie detector they marketed under the name "Truster."

  But the spammers realized their biggest problem was the increasingly impenetrable filters used by AOL and other ISPs, as well as by individual computer users. Amazing Internet's messages simply weren't getting through.

  * * *

  [1] Copies of the recruiting ads from "Dave Bridger" were posted to the news.admin.net-abuse.sightings newsgroup by several recipients beginning June 9, 2003.

  [2] A note about Miss Daisy's bonus was published at the Pinacle Partnership site when I viewed it in August 2003. I had signed up as a Pinacle affiliate under a pseudonym as part of my research into Amazing Internet Products.

  [3] Hawke failed to notice that Pinacle Affiliate 164 was actually Alan "Dr. Fatburn" Moore. Dr. Fatburn had signed up without giving his name, but he had listed an email address that could be traced back to him. Already sued out of the spamming business by AOL and Symantec, Dr. Fatburn was merely hoping to keep an eye on his former nemesis.

  [4] Amazing Internet stored a log file containing customer names, postal and email addressees, phone numbers, and credit card numbers at its Pinacle sites. I found one of the logs in July 2003 with the help of a former Amazing Internet Products employee. (I located him after a tip from Mad Pierre.) The employee told me about the company's habit of leaving its order logs in plain view at its web sites. The order data was stored there, he said, so sales affiliates could easily monitor how well their spam runs were working. Each day, Bournival would download the logs, submit the orders for processing by Amazing Internet's credit card processor, and delete the log files.

  But for some reason Bournival hadn't been deleting the order logs. Some 6,000 orders, all of them placed in the month of July 2003, were viewable. Most of the orders were for two bottles (or one hundred dollars worth) of pills.

  It was possible that some of the orders were the work of junk email opponents. Earlier in 2003, a self-proclaimed anti-spammer had released a software program named FormFucker (FF). Its purpose was to screw up spammers' web sites by automatically entering bogus order data. According to the tool's anonymous author, FF analyzes a spammer's order form and then pumps his database full of realistic-looking orders. As a result, the spammer can't tell which are real and which are bogus, so he ends up throwing away the entire batch.

  Amazing's order log did include hundreds of lines of random characters and other bogus data that had been manually input by irate recipients of the company's spams. Other visitors crammed angry messages into the space on the form allocated for the customer's mailing address and other details. This message, from someone using an Internet service provider in Massachusetts, was typical: "YOU MADE A BIG MISTAKE WHEN YOU STOLE MY EMAIL. I AM GOING TO FIND YOU AND YOU WILL BE *SORRY*. YOU WILL ROT IN HELL."

  One AOL user, apparently frustrated by the site's lack of contact information, used the order form to leave the following request: "I need to know if this product will be harmful to me. I had heart surgery and use Lanoxin, Zocor and Zestril and Dilantin. Please return my inquiry. I did not know how to contact you. Send return by email."

  Another possible explanation for the voluminous orders at Goringly.biz was that credit card thieves, or "carders," had fraudulently placed them. Such online crooks have been known to sign up for online affiliate programs in order to "monetize" their stolen credit cards, according to Dan Clements, CEO of CardCops.com, which tracks Internet credit card fraud. The technique, known as carding cash, enables the crooks to rack up sizable commission fees. The carders simply submit fake orders using purloined credit card numbers at sites where the crooks get bounties for orders. Such a scam often goes undetected, says Clements, because the cardholder is unlikely to open an investigation when a fifty-dollar charge for penis pills shows up on his account. Banks usually refund the charge to the cardholder and charge the amount back to the online merchant who took the order.

  The exposed order log quietly disappeared after I sent email to Amazing Internet Products notifying it about the security problem. But the incident would send a ripple through the spam scene. As I reported in an August 2003 article for Wired News, the data provided the world with a depressing answer to the question, "Who in their right mind would buy something from a spammer?"

  [5] My article, "Meet the Spam Nazi," was published by Salon.com on July 29, 2003. Wired.com published "Swollen Orders Show Spam's Allure" on August 6, 2003.

  [6] The former Amazing Internet Products employee agreed to let me interview him on the condition that I wouldn't publish his name.

  [7] In the middle of August, I gave a copy of Bradorders.dat, Amazing Internet's order log file, to the New Hampshire Attorney General's office. Later that month, I got an instant message from Dr. Fatburn. We had chatted a few times about Hawke and Bournival earlier that summer, after I discovered his name in many of Amazing Internet's domain registrations. Now Dr. Fatburn said he wanted to buy my copy of Amazing's database. He said he wanted to send postcards to the addresses on the list. The cards would advertise his site, Thinkmeds.com, where he was selling Pfizer's Viagra.

  "I would make it worth your while. We only use postcard mailings, so no one would know where the list came from," Dr. Fatburn said.

  When I ignored his
proposal, he continued. "If you want to sell that database outright or do a joint venture with me, you could easily make five to ten thousand dollars in the next few months," he said.

  I told Dr. Fatburn I would think about it. But I had no intention of giving the list to anyone (aside from the New Hampshire Attorney General's office).

  "With a list that's targeted at males, its a perfect match. I bet five to ten thousand dollars would come in handy for you at Christmas time," he said.

  A week went by, and Dr. Fatburn contacted me again. He wanted to know if I had given any further thought to selling the customer database.

  "Alan, I wish I could help you, but I can't give up the order log," I replied.

  "Why? It was public domain and you were doing freelance work at the time. What's the conflict?" he asked.

  When I inquired why he didn't offer to buy the data from Bournival and Hawke, Dr. Fatburn said he didn't want to get involved with them.

  "I would rather work with someone who is honest, like a reporter," he said.

  "Selling a list like that is hardly honest," I replied.

  Dr. Fatburn suggested I was being inconsistent.

  "You were willing to take the list down and contact the people. Weren't you? Was that fair of you? I do not see where you should be drawing a line now when you did not draw the line in the beginning," he said.

  Dr. Fatburn signed off before I could reply. But he approached me again a few hours later that day.

  "You have a list that contains $500,000 in sales (so you say). I have offered you a partnership on all future sales generated using that list. You are a freelance reporter. Let's get together and partner up," he said.