To that end, Shiksaa removed almost all of the files from Chickenboner.com. She took down pages displaying the various photos parodying Andrew Brunner, Bubba Catts, Rodona Garst, Davis Hawke, Bill Waggoner, and others. Shiksaa also removed the "Bulk Barn Diaries"—her log files of conversations with Richter, Dr. Fatburn, and other spammers. She had begun cleaning house back in the spring of 2003, after Mark Felstein sued her and the rest of the Nanae Nine. But now the site was totally spartan.
About the only thing Shiksaa left on her site was the big "Uncle Sam" cartoon on the home page. Like the World War I recruiting poster, the image at Chickenboner.com showed a gray-haired man dressed in red, white, and blue, pointing at the viewer. But an anti-spammer had doctored the image to give the personification of the U.S. government a wooden mallet in his hand. Beneath Uncle Sam were the words, "The Lumber Cartel Wants You."
* * *
[4] Shiksaa recounted her conversation with Steve Richter during an April 7, 2004, interview.
The Phoenix Company
Davis Hawke spent Christmas Day 2003 at his parents' home in Medfield, Massachusetts. He and Patricia drove up from Rhode Island in his Crown Victoria with their two wolves in the backseat. (Hawke had brought Patricia along on an invitation from his mother.) He was antsy from the moment he pulled into the Greenbaums' long driveway.
Hawke had intermittently been in touch with his father since dropping out of college. But he had only recently mended ways with his mother. They had tacitly agreed not to talk about his neo-Nazi period. But she made it clear she didn't approve of his spamming either. The thought of spending several hours in her home filled him with dread.
To break the ice, Hawke presented his mother with a gag gift soon after he arrived. It was one of the Truster portable lie detectors he had been spamming for a couple months. He explained that the handheld unit worked by measuring the stress levels in a person's voice. Israel's Mossad security service, he told her, used a similar device to interrogate suspected terrorists. Peggy Greenbaum didn't even take the Truster out of its box. But he could tell she was pleased to learn he wasn't just selling penis-enlargement pills.[5]
After lunch, they all took the dogs (his parents had a Husky mix) for a stroll through the woods to a nearby pond. It was unusually mild for December, with temperatures in the fifties. As they scuffed across the remnants of snow on the ground, Hawke's mother posed a question.
"Britt, you say you have such a huge business, but why aren't you on the list of the top spammers?" she asked. Mrs. Greenbaum had recently done an Internet search and found the Spamhaus Rokso page. Aside from Patricia's mink coat, she saw little evidence that her son was as wealthy as he claimed.
"Ah, but that's the mark of my success," Hawke replied, not certain whether she was criticizing or just teasing. He explained that getting blacklisted on Rokso made life very difficult. He said his strategy was to keep a low profile and quietly get rich without attracting attention.
Then Hawke told his parents about how he and Bournival were about to launch a major new project. In the coming weeks, he said, they planned to interview several hundred people up in New Hampshire and build a new customer service center. He couldn't tell them much, except to say it would make millions of dollars.
"They're going to want to interview me on Larry King Live," said Hawke. But just to be safe, he told his parents, he would continue to rent rather than buy a house, and he would drive second-hand cars.
"You can't own assets in this business," Hawke said.
That was just fine with the Greenbaums. They would have preferred if their son were a doctor or a lawyer. But their moral objections to his choice of career were softened by his pragmatic approach to the business. In any case, they considered spamming a lot better than what he had been doing previously.
When everyone returned from the walk, Hawke told his parents he needed to head out. He said he wanted to get up to New Hampshire right away, so that he and Bournival could begin what would probably be a two-week process of launching the new operation. It disappointed the Greenbaums to see their son leave so soon, but they were happy he seemed so energized by his work. He promised to send them updates by email.
A few days later, Hawke pulled up with a rental truck at the loading dock outside Amazing Internet Products's office in Manchester. He wasn't there to unload telephone headsets or chairs or desks for the hundred new employees he'd told his parents about. Hawke was just claiming his half of the company's forty-plus computers and inventory of pills.
Hawke didn't want to upset his parents at Christmas by revealing that his new project had actually stalled out a few weeks previously, when he and Bournival decided to dissolve their partnership.
The big plan would have involved sending a new form of spam aimed at mobile phones. Hawke and Bournival had discovered that most major cellular-phone providers in the United States operated Internet gateways for forwarding email to subscribers' phones. Few cellular customers in the U.S. used the feature, known as short message service (SMS). But all the carriers had nonetheless set up millions of email addresses with subscribers' ten-digit cell phone numbers as their account name (e.g., [email protected]).
At first, both Hawke and Bournival saw an excellent opportunity to target the cell-phone gateways with automated spam attacks. They could configure their spam programs to latch onto a provider's domain and pepper it with area codes, prefixes, and number combinations that might be valid for the particular provider. (To spam Sprint PCS in Dallas, for example, they'd start with [email protected], and then hit 2144170001, and incrementally work their way through all the possible phone numbers.)
While SMS spamming was common in Europe and Asia, Hawke believed the U.S. market was still waiting to be pillaged. Very few U.S. spammers knew how to mass-broadcast SMS messages. At the same time, he figured most cell phone carriers in the country had poor safeguards to prevent spamming compared to regular ISPs. Even better, as far as Hawke could tell, the CAN-SPAM laws did not apply to cell phones.
But Bournival came to doubt whether SMS spams would actually produce sales. The technology limited messages to a scant 160 characters. Besides, they couldn't contain clickable hyperlinks, so the spams would need to include a toll-free number or a web site address. Bournival argued that most recipients would be annoyed by the spams, and those who weren't would be too lazy to seek more information.
At the time, Bournival had generally lost patience with Hawke as a partner. Hawke's impulsiveness and sloppiness grated on him. Plus, their 50/50 revenue split seemed unfair given how much more work Bournival was doing. (Having access to Hawke's unlimited merchant account seemed irrelevant when business fell off the previous autumn and they were taking in only a few thousand dollars a month.) After agreeing they could each make more money spamming solo, the two decided to divvy up their computer equipment and inventories and go their separate ways.
Hawke and Bournival stayed in regular contact. But while Bournival started 2004 without any major New Year's business resolutions, Hawke was busy setting up an office to house his new firm, the Phoenix Company. He arranged to rent the top floor of a three-story office building on Main Street in Pawtucket, overlooking the Seekonk River. The office occupied over 5,000 square feet in the modern, brick building. Hawke's new crew consisted of Mauricio Ruiz, Mike Clark as technical guru and spamming affiliate, and Jacob Brown—a young guy he met on the Pawtucket tennis courts who had previously been working as a waiter—as office manager. Hawke also hired several young women—most of them friends of Mauricio's—to handle customer service. At one point, Hawke transferred the registrations of hundreds of Amazing Internet Products domains to the Phoenix Company and listed Ruiz as the owner of the domains.
The Phoenix Company started off spamming some of Hawke's old standbys: the Truster lie detector, the Banned CD, and Pinacle penis pills. Then, in late January, when Hawke heard the FDA had announced a ban on ephedra sales effective April 12, he cooked u
p an idea for a new spam campaign. Hawke arranged with Certified Natural to private-label ephedra pills under the RaveX brand. The name was a reference to "raves"—high energy, all-night dance parties that feature loud techno music and often involve drugs such as Ecstasy and methamphetamines.
Hawke's RaveX web sites, designed by Certified, featured a pink-and-black illustration of a young woman dancing wildly. Beside her in white type were the words, "Pure Ephedra. Buy It While It's Legal." Despite reports of several deaths linked to ephedra, Hawke's spams touted RaveX as an "all-natural stimulant" and claimed it was safe.
"Over-the-counter medicines such as aspirin and Nyquil are far more dangerous than RaveX," said Hawke's spams.
To increase his odds of getting his spams into AOL, Hawke switched to a new program called Dark Mailer. Developed by Russian programmers, Dark Mailer was pricey, selling for around $500. But the program gave spammers unprecedented power to manipulate their email message headers, even though doing so was illegal under CAN-SPAM. Through trial-and-error testing, Hawke quickly discovered ways to tweak his spam and penetrate most ISP filters, including AOL's, pretty much at will.
Meanwhile, Bournival was trying to comply with CAN-SPAM just enough to stay out of legal trouble. He began using valid "From" addresses in all of his spams and always included instructions on how recipients could opt out of future mailings. But Bournival was reluctant to list his mailing address in the spams, as required by the new law. And he still relied on Super Mailer, which illegally used proxies, to send his messages. In order to further differentiate his mailings from Hawke's—who was paying no attention to CAN-SPAM—Bournival arranged with Certified Natural to provide him a new, private-label brand of penis pills. Soon, he was spamming emails for Sizer XXX.
Bournival did pretty well without Hawke or his merchant account, although he certainly was at no risk of maxing out his $25,000 processing limit. Nor was he making enough to consider an offer he got from Alan "Dr. Fatburn" Moore to take over his order processing. Fatburn had been repeatedly pestering Bournival by phone and instant message to outsource the function to him for a flat fee per order. Bournival figured Fatburn was just hungry for cash now that he had been sued out of the spamming business. But something about the offer made him suspicious. Bournival wondered whether Fatburn was simply trying to lure him into a trap, as part of the settlement agreement he had signed with AOL in December.[6]
Come February, the Phoenix Company's profitable spamming run temporarily hit the skids. As was its habit, AOL had fine-tuned its spam filters, and suddenly RaveX spams were not getting through. Ruiz and Clark went back to the drawing board, in hope of tweaking the messages so they would slip by. But Hawke decided it was a perfect time for him and Brown to dust off the abandoned cell-phone spamming project.
The first task was to create mailing lists. The two men scoured the Internet to find information about the various six-digit area code and prefix combinations in use by cell phone carriers. They could find nothing comprehensive, so they began manually compiling lists based on cell phone numbers of friends and relatives. Then they moved on to extrapolating from cell phone numbers they found published on the Web.
Next, Hawke and Brown sent test spams to Brown's Verizon Wireless cell phone and Hawke's Sprint PCS phone. They were surprised to discover the carriers apparently had rudimentary filters in place. After some experimentation with the content and headers of the messages, they were able to get most of their spams through.
At that point, late February 2004, Hawke and Brown began pounding out millions of RaveX ads to Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS addresses.
To stay under the SMS message limit, Hawke included just a subject line ("Banned in 30 days?") and a short message body ("Get EPHEDRINE now! Guaranteed to work or your money back!"). The messages also listed one of the several toll-free numbers Hawke had set up. Spam recipients who called the number heard a sixty-second advertisement recorded by one of Hawke's female employees. Listeners who lasted until the end of the recording were instructed to press 2 on their phone keypad to place an order, or press 1 to unsubscribe.
Cell phone customers, it turned out, were even more hostile toward spam than email users. Irate recipients phoned the Phoenix Company's toll-free line and vented at the handful of people Hawke had hired to handle calls. Others jammed the voice mail system with angry messages. Hawke managed to take in only a couple dozen orders before the phone company shut down the toll-free line. In the first week of March 2004, local papers in Oklahoma and North Carolina ran articles about residents who had been roused from sleep by their beeping cell phones, only to find messages advertising ephedra.
The plan that had looked so good to Hawke on paper proved to be a disaster. But Hawke wasn't ready to give up on SMS spamming just yet.
* * *
[5] Author telephone interview with Peggy Greenbaum, March 10, 2004.
[6] In late August, 2003, Alan Moore told me that AOL would be interested in any information I had gleaned in my reporting about the company. "My attorneys could bring the idea to them this week when we speak next, if you have any interest at all," said Moore. The next day, he contacted me with questions about where Amazing Internet Products's offices were located. When I asked why, he said it was so they could "get served by anyone suing Hawke."
AOL v. Davis Hawke et al.
Brad Bournival's ringing cell phone woke him on March 10. It was eight in the morning; he'd hit the hay at around five a.m., his usual bedtime. Bournival's half-brother, Erik Francoeur, was on the line. He told Bournival that someone had just been at the apartment on Montgomery Street and was trying to serve Bournival with a lawsuit. The man was waving a photo taken from Bournival's Yahoo! member profile, which showed him, unshaven, wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses. The man wanted to know if anyone had seen Bournival.[7]
"What did you tell him?" asked a groggy Bournival.
"The usual drill," said Francoeur. Bournival had instructed his family members to play dumb with anyone who came looking for him.
Bournival thanked Francoeur and hung up. He assumed the visitor was just another schmuck trying to get settlement money out of him. Bournival went back to sleep.
Bournival awoke again early that evening. As he was checking his email and reading the headlines at Yahoo! News, Bournival spotted an article about spam lawsuits filed that day by AOL, Earthlink, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. Bournival leaned in.
According to the story, the lawsuits were the first by ISPs under the new CAN-SPAM law. AOL's lawsuit targeted Davis W. Hawke, Braden Bournival, and fifty unidentified "John Does." The article quoted AOL's general counsel, Randall Boe.
"If you're a spammer, this is not a great day for you," said Boe. "Ultimately, we're going to locate you and sue you."
Bournival stood up beside his desk, nearly overwhelmed with the fear that The Authorities were about to pound on his oversized front door. Then he forced himself to relax. He gazed back at the computer screen. Seeing his name among the top stories on Yahoo! was unreal. He had known for months—ever since Dr. Fatburn got sued—that this day might come. It was the risk he took every time he clicked the Send button. Yet he didn't think AOL would choose him, not with so many bigger, more egregious spammers in the business.
But according to AOL, he and Hawke had generated over 100,000 complaints from members since January 1, 2004. The company had sicced its superstar outside counsel on him—Jon Praed, the same lawyer who sued Moore and Ralsky. AOL claimed Hawke, Bournival, and their affiliates falsified headers so that messages appeared to come from Hotmail or other ISPs. It said they had sent spam using dictionary attacks and address harvesting, which were prohibited under CAN-SPAM.
The law gave AOL the authority to seek damages of $100 per violation. What was that, twelve million dollars? Bournival looked around his high-ceilinged study, in the home that looked like a fraternity house minus the frat boys. How could he possibly survive this lawsuit?
Bournival reached for his cell phone. He was a
bout to call Hawke, but he stopped. Instead, he dialed Dr. Fatburn's number. He needed the name of Fatburn's lawyer.
That evening, Mauricio Ruiz was over at Hawke's house. He was surfing the Web on one computer while Hawke used another. Ruiz spotted the article first.[8]
"Yo, Johnny, you are not fucking going to believe this!"
"Yo yo, what up," Hawke replied. He pushed off from his desk and rolled his chair across the floor toward Ruiz.
"Look," said Ruiz, jabbing his finger at the computer monitor.
The two of them stared at the screen, nearly cheek to cheek. Hawke impatiently scrolled through the article, waiting for the punch line. He was disappointed that the story buried his name in the tenth paragraph. But he began to laugh, a big, natural laugh.
"What is so funny?" Ruiz asked.
"How are they going to sue me?" Hawke said, his eyes flashing. "I have no assets."
Then Hawke pointed to the bottom of the screen. The last paragraph of the article stated, "Hawke did not return a telephone call from The Associated Press to his home in Massachusetts."
"Hell, they don't even know where I fucking live!" he shouted.
Later that evening, when Bournival phoned him, Hawke was still laughing about the lawsuit.[9]
"Congratulations," Hawke told him.
Bournival wasn't able to make light of the matter. He told Hawke that he was going to call a lawyer in the morning.
"Why? What can he possibly do for you?"
"I don't know. I'll find out my options," said Bournival.
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