Brad Bournival might have been precocious at chess, but his first attempt at spamming was downright pitiful. In October 2001, he mailed ads for an herbal energy pill to a list of 50,000 email addresses. Hawke said he had bought the list from Alan “Dr. Fatburn” Moore, who had harvested them from eBay. The addresses usually gave Hawke a good response rate—nearly two-tenths of a percent—so Bournival braced himself for a deluge of around one hundred orders worth several thousand dollars.

A week went by, and he mysteriously still hadn’t received a single order.

Bournival stuck with it, though. After some additional coaching from Hawke, the 17-year-old was soon pulling down nearly one thousand dollars each week as a spammer, mostly from sales of pheromone cologne and ink-jet refill kits. The money was proof that he had made the right decision to drop out of school. Young relatives and friends still in school had no money or were working minimum-wage jobs, jealous of his new career as an Internet entrepreneur.

On Hawke’s suggestion, Bournival plowed some of his spamming profits back into the business. He bought a couple of new computers and had a DSL line installed in his mother’s apartment on Montgomery Street in Manchester. The phone company didn’t do inside wiring, so Bournival had to snake the wire from the network interface box at the back of the building up the siding and into a window on the second floor. Inside, he used duct tape to secure the wire to the floor so no one would trip on it. But that didn’t stop the pit bull owned by his mother’s boyfriend from chewing through the wire one day and temporarily downing his Internet connection.

Bournival’s web sites were held together with the digital equivalent of duct tape and were prone to similar problems. In March of 2002, anti-spammers discovered that his pheromone-labs.com site, which he shared with Hawke, was insecure and allowed anyone to browse the customer order data, including credit card numbers. Someone posted a note to Nanae about the discovery and published the domain registration record for the site, which included Bournival’s name, address, email, and home phone number. It was just six months into his spamming career, and Bournival had already been outed on Nanae.

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...”:

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:

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

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:

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-processing 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.

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:

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.

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, weeks 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 scurrying 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.”

Uy submitted an official request to Tripod appealing the shutdown, and then he posted a message to Nanae.

“Dr. Fatburn knocked down my Tripod site,” he announced. “Looks like he’s got at least three or four neurons in his little head. Anyone have an inside contact at Tripod who could restore my site?”

Uy never managed to convince Tripod to reinstate his service. But as often happens when Internet users encounter censorship, several mirror copies of Uy’s site suddenly appeared on other domains. Uy also set up his own mirror at the Geocities home page service, which Dr. Fatburn was unable to get shut down. As a result, while the world was preoccupied with the U.S. military invasion of Iraq, Fatburn was forced to ratchet up his threats against Uy.

On March 26, Uy received a phone call from the Computer Crimes Unit of the Maryland Police. An officer informed him that Dr. Fatburn was leaning on police to charge him as an accomplice to harassment. The officer suggested that a State Attorney might take up the case if Uy didn’t remove his site.

Uy’s lawyer had advised him that Fatburn’s case was weak and would be deemed frivolous by any court. But Uy didn’t cherish the idea of being led off in handcuffs. Ten years ago, before he was a family man, he might have stoically allowed himself to become a martyr over spam. But, as Uy posted in a message that evening to Suespammers, an Internet mailing list, his wife had made clear that her reaction would be chilly if he got himself arrested.

“We have a nice couch, but I’d rather not sleep on it,” he wrote.

Uy made a call to the State Attorney’s office and managed to convince prosecutors to hold off filing criminal charges against him. But he didn’t realize that Dr. Fatburn was also pursuing a civil case against him. As Uy was eating dinner with his family on the evening of March 31, a deputy from the local sheriff’s office knocked on the door. The deputy handed Uy a Petition of Peace order and a notice to appear in an Anne Arundel County district court a week later. Normally used to restrain spouse abusers, the order prohibited Uy from going near Moore or his property. But it did not require him to take down his web site.

On the morning of April 7, Uy met his attorney, Jon Biedron, at the Glen Burnie courthouse. Although they were confident of their legal position, Uy and Biedron had some doubts. Typically, the district courthouse was a venue for adjudicating things like driving violations or family disputes, with cases usually lasting less than ten minutes. How would a judge in one of the lowest courts in the land handle a First Amendment case involving the Internet?

Judge Robert Wilcox began by questioning Dr. Fatburn about why he filed the complaint against Uy. After showing the judge a printout of Uy’s web site, Fatburn argued that the posting of his personal contact information might look harmless, but it was inciting others to harass him.^[6]

“The whole idea behind that web site is that I am a company that people in his anti-spam community should take notice of and take action against,” said Fatburn. He then held up a stack of invoices and said anti-spammers were responsible for signing him up for subscriptions to book clubs and dozens of magazines.

“As a direct result of this guy over here’s actions,” said Fatburn, gesturing to Uy, “we actually fear for our lives.”

After listening to Dr. Fatburn for about ten minutes, Judge Wilcox seemed ready to issue his ruling.

“I don’t need to hear [Uy’s] counsel. I know what he’s going to say. Doesn’t [Uy] have a Constitutional right here? You’re asking me to stop him from posting stuff on the Internet,” said the judge. He noted that the harassment Dr. Fatburn was experiencing was potentially illegal, “but to say that [Uy] is doing it, simply by providing identifying information...that’s where I’m having the trouble.”

Fatburn’s attorney, Cheryl Asensio, sought to shift the momentum of the conversation. She asserted that Uy had personally made harassing telephone calls and sent packages to her client. But when the judge asked whether she had proof of those claims, she admitted she didn’t.

“Then how can I pass an order?” asked Judge Wilcox. “Isn’t the burden on you to provide clear and convincing evidence? If you tell me you don’t know who did it, we don’t even get to first base,” he said.

“I didn’t get him to admit on the stand that he’s done it, but it’s certainly in his statements,” argued Asensio.

“Do you want to call him as a witness?” offered the judge.

Asensio hesitated briefly. “May I call my client first?” she asked.

“Sure,” answered the judge.

Until this point, twenty-five minutes into the hearing, Uy and his attorney felt they had a slum-dunk case going. But now it looked as though Dr. Fatburn was going to milk his day in court for all it was worth.

Indeed, for nearly an hour, Asensio questioned Dr. Fatburn in detail about the harassment he had undergone and Uy’s alleged role in it. Her questions to Fatburn frequently caused objections from Biedron that were sustained by the judge. The whole proceeding, taking place before a nearly empty courtroom, had the air of a law school mock trial.

Finally, it was Biedron’s turn to cross-examine Fatburn. He began by asking Fatburn whether he recalled posting his name, address, cell phone number, and photograph at one of his business web sites.

“It’s contact information for my customers,” answered Fatburn.

“So, that’s a yes?”

“That’s a yes.”

When Biedron was through questioning Dr. Fatburn a few minutes later, Asensio called Uy to testify. She began by asking why Uy had contacted the Washington Post, which the day before had published an article about his dispute with Dr. Fatburn.

“I wanted people to know about the case,” said Uy.

“Do you want Mr. Moore’s business to stop?”

“I’d like him to do business differently,” he replied.

At one point, Asensio tried to bolster her claim that Uy was directly involved in harassing Dr. Fatburn. She asked Uy, who was under oath, whether he ever ordered magazine subscriptions over the Internet for anyone else.

“I’ve sent people some gifts,” said Uy.

“Any to Mr. Moore?” asked Asensio.

“No.”

“Have you ever ordered books on tape?”

“No.”

As Asensio concluded her twenty-minute interrogation of Uy, Judge Wilcox said he had a question.

“How did you get [Moore’s] unlisted phone number?”

“As far as I know, it wasn’t unlisted. He’s got it published on a couple of his web sites,” answered Uy.

“All the numbers that you listed were discoverable by the public?” asked the judge.

“Yeah, I just went on the web and looked them up and there it was,” said Uy.

Judge Wilcox had heard enough. As the hearing approached the two-hour mark, he said he was ready to rule on the case.

“What we have here is a petitioner who is aggrieved, and rightly so,” said the judge. “But I think he has the wrong target. Clearly, if we could identify the persons ordering these magazines or making these phone calls, this court would have little hesitation granting the requested relief or enforcing any sanctions. But I cannot find from the evidence that Mr. Uy did anything wrong. He did something that Mr. Moore doesn’t like, but that’s not the same thing. So I will deny the petition for the domestic order.”

With that, the hearing was over. Uy and Dr. Fatburn separately left the courtroom without so much as a nod of the head toward the other. That afternoon, Uy celebrated the decision by posting a note at Slashdot.org, a popular discussion site that refers to itself as “News for nerds.” Uy briefly recounted the court hearing and concluded with a note about Dr. Fatburn:

Dr. Fatburn returned to his home office determined to appeal the court’s ruling. To him, the case strongly paralleled a recent one involving the operators of a web site that encouraged attacks on operators of abortion clinics. In Dr. Fatburn’s case, Uy had made no obvious appeals for antis to attack him. But Dr. Fatburn believed the proof was out there somewhere.

Still smarting from his courtroom defeat, Dr. Fatburn was hit with much bigger legal troubles a week later. On April 15, 2003, Symantec filed a lawsuit against Dr. Fatburn in a federal district court for Central California. In its complaint, Symantec accused Dr. Fatburn of trademark and copyright infringement, unfair competition, and false advertising, among other charges. The software firm asked the court to stop Fatburn from marketing any products bearing Symantec trademarks and to force him to pay compensatory and punitive damages.

The same day, America Online filed a separate suit against Dr. Fatburn. AOL’s lawsuit, filed by the firm’s outside counsel Jon Praed, focused on the spams sent by Fatburn and his affiliates, which included numerous unidentified “John Doe” defendants. AOL accused Dr. Fatburn and his henchmen of violating Virginia business and computer crime statutes when they sent its members millions of fraudulent ads for everything from diet pills and herbal Viagra to anti-virus software. AOL claimed the messages typically listed false information in their headers in order to conceal their senders’ true addresses. AOL’s complaint asked a federal court in Virginia to prohibit Dr. Fatburn and his affiliates from sending ads to AOL subscribers and to compel him to pay damages.

As soon as he found out about the double-barreled lawsuits against him, Dr. Fatburn knew his days as an email marketer were over. And when they read about the lawsuits against their former business partner, Davis Hawke and Brad Bournival realized their days were probably numbered as well.