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:

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.

One Saturday night in mid-June of 2003, Spamhaus.org was staggered by unusually heavy visitor traffic. But this was no weekend rush by Internet users to review the latest Rokso listings. When Spamhaus director Steve Linford checked the site’s log files from his control center in London, he discovered that hundreds of computers from all over the Internet were simultaneously bombarding one of Spamhaus’s web servers with bogus requests for data. Spamhaus was under what computer experts call a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. Using special DDOS programs, attackers were trying to cripple Spamhaus with packets of data, rendering the site unusable by legitimate visitors.

Linford quickly fended off the attackers by adjusting the firewall that guarded the edge of Spamhaus’s network. Spamhaus had been victimized by DDOS attacks in the past, and Linford might have headed off to bed without giving the matter further thought. But as he scanned the list of Internet protocol (IP) addresses of the computers trying to “packet” Spamhaus, he noticed something odd. Almost all of them were home PCs connected to the Internet via broadband Internet service providers such as Verizon, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Bell South.

For Linford, one of his worst fears was coming true. Since January, computer security experts had been tracking the gradual spread of SoBig, a new breed of computer virus. Once installed on a PC with a cable modem or DSL line, the software had two malicious purposes. SoBig was designed to turn the infected computer into a remotely controlled “zombie” participant in DDOS attacks. SoBig’s other purpose was to allow the PC to serve as a spam-sending proxy, through which a spammer could send junk emails with anonymity. In nearly all cases, the owners of the infected systems would have no idea their computers were being used by the virus.

It wasn’t clear whether spammers were responsible for the creation of SoBig. But they certainly stood to benefit from it. With an ever expanding network of thousands of hijacked proxies for sending spam, junk emailers could evade anti-spammers and the operators of spam-blocking services. Meanwhile, SoBig’s DDOS feature could be used to mire the blocklist sites with bogus network traffic.

Throughout the summer of 2003, Spamhaus and other anti-spam sites, including Spews and the SpamCop spam-reporting service, were repeatedly hit by DDOS attacks from zombies infected with SoBig or related viruses, including one named Fizzer. Meanwhile, the percentage of spam originating from virus-infected computers was soaring. According to spam-tracking services, nearly 70 percent of junk email was entering the Internet through broadband PCs compromised by SoBig and similar malicious software.

To Linford and other veteran Internet technicians, the rise of spam zombies was part of a distressing trend: the acceptance by hackers of spamming as a lucrative profession.

“Once upon a time, hackers hated spammers,” wrote Linford in an August 2003 posting to Nanae. “All the real hackers detest spam and the losers who send it. But lately things have changed...hackers now see spamming and scamming as ‘kewl,’” he wrote. As an example, Linford pointed to “Styro” and “Foam,” the hacker aliases of two New Orleans teenagers. In their member profiles at SpamSoft.biz, an online forum for spammers, the teens listed as their interests “spamming, scamming, and cracking” (the latter is slang for breaking into web sites without authorization). While an earlier generation of hackers had altruistically used their technical skills to help drive scam artists and spammers out of business, this new breed of computer whiz seemed to Linford both mercenary and morally challenged.

Some unidentified anti-spammers decided to fight back against the hacker-spammers by releasing a Trojan horse program of their own. Starting in August of 2003, junk emailers began receiving messages forged to appear as if they were from a spammer known for selling college diplomas. The messages offered a free technique for removing “honey pots” (otherwise known as spam traps) from spam mailing lists. Interested spammers were invited to view an online multimedia demonstration of the software. But the web page listed for the video was actually booby-trapped. If viewed using a not fully updated version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the page would silently install a program named honey2.exe on the victim’s computer. The code contained a variant of SubSeven, an infamous program designed to allow the target PC to be remotely controlled by an attacker.^[9]

It wasn’t clear whether any junk emailers fell for the trick. Some quickly recognized the Trojan horse video for what it was and published warnings in SpecialHam.com, a new online forum for spammers. But what was obvious was that the war between spammers and antis had escalated.^[10]

Meanwhile, the army of spam zombies continued to grow. As viruses claimed increasing numbers of home computers, spammers discovered a new way to put the infected systems to work. Instead of simply deploying them to send junk email or launch attacks against blacklist sites, spammers were using the compromised PCs to host their web sites. In September, ads for “invisible, bullet-proof” hosting began to appear at SpecialHam.com and other spam sites. For $1,500 per month, one Poland-based group was offering to protect sites from the network-sleuthing tools spam opponents used to identify the Internet protocol address of a site. The group claimed to control nearly half a million “Trojaned” computers, most of them home PCs connected to cable modems or DSL lines. The hacked systems contained special software developed by the Poles that routed traffic between Internet users and customers’ web sites via thousands of the hijacked computers. The constantly rotating intermediary systems confounded tools such as traceroute (a utility used to track the path between a user’s computer and a remote system), effectively masking the true location of the web site.

By September, incessant DDOS attacks on two smaller blacklist sites, Monkeys.com and Osirusoft.com, forced their operators to announce the permanent shutdown of their services. The Spews site was also frequently unreachable due to the DDOS attacks. But the service continued to function, thanks to Internet users who independently published mirror copies of the Spews “zone files” containing the list of blacklisted IP addresses.

Desperate to identify the source of the attacks, Linford tried to cajole spammers into ratting out the perpetrators. In exchange for information, he offered a form of probation to several junk emailers listed on Rokso. If they turned over evidence that led to the arrest of the attackers, Linford was willing to loosen the rules for the spammers’ removal from Rokso.

But some junk emailers misinterpreted Linford’s offer. In September, an anonymous person posted a message to Nanae, accusing Linford of trying to blackmail spammers. According to the author, Linford had threatened to keep him on Rokso permanently if he didn’t give up information about a suspected source of the attacks. The unidentified spammer included in his note an excerpt of email from Linford.

“You forget who’s holding the cards here,” Linford had written to the spammer. “We will keep you blocked for years.”

In a reply on Nanae, Linford pointed out that the anonymous newsgroup message had been posted from an account owned by Bernie Johnson, a Michigan bulk emailer with connections to spam king Alan Ralsky. Linford revealed that he had been discussing the attacks with Johnson and confirmed that he had offered a deal in exchange for information.

“I’ve given the same deal to a number of former spammers who today run legitimate hosting businesses and have never been heard of spamming or hosting spammers again. It’s called parole for good behavior, a concept enforcement authorities the world over use every day,” said Linford.

But Linford’s efforts failed to unmask the attackers. And in November, a new virus, specifically designed to knock Spamhaus off the Internet, was spotted. Known as Mimail E, the virus contained code that automatically caused an infected PC to begin attacking Spamhaus.org in order to make it unreachable. But it had no effect on the Spamhaus Block List (SBL), which was actually hosted on over thirty servers located around the world.

A successor virus that appeared in December 2003 had a more significant impact. Mimail F targeted several anti-spam sites, including Spamhaus.org and Spews.org, with a denial-of-service attack. The new code also orchestrated a massive Joe-job on the blocklist services. PCs infected with Mimail F sent a flood of emails that were forged to appear as though they were from Spamhaus.org. The messages informed recipients that Spamhaus.org would be charging their credit cards $22.95 “on a weekly basis,” and that a “free pack of child porn CDs is already on the way to your billing address.” The spoofed emails also invited Internet users to visit Spamhaus.org, Spews.org, SpamCop.net, and a few other sites to view “all types of underage porn.”

For days, irate users swamped Spamhaus with complaints about the spam. Linford did his best to explain that a virus, and not Spamhaus, had generated the messages. He referred the annoyed spam recipients to the web sites of anti-virus software companies, where they could find more information about Mimail. Still, the gripes continued to pour in.

Some gullible recipients even took to posting messages on Usenet newsgroups, warning others not to visit Spamhaus.org or the other sites listed in the solicitation.

“What on earth can we do about these people?” wrote one apparently confused Internet user, referring to Spamhaus. “They’re probably just harvesting for email addresses, but who knows? Any ideas as to how to rid the Internet of these types would be appreciated.”

To rid the Internet of spam zombies, many spam opponents called upon cable and DSL providers to be more proactive and to take steps such as removing infected customer PCs from their networks. Some ISPs, such as Cox, earned the approval of anti-spammers when they began blocking their users from sending email through mail servers outside the ISP’s network. But Comcast, the biggest cable-Internet provider in the U.S., seemed paralyzed by the zombie problem and delayed taking action that would have stopped zombie PCs from sending spam through third-party mail servers. This led some anti-spammers to call for the blacklisting of millions of addresses assigned to Comcast.

As a stopgap measure, in December 2003, Linford began making plans to create a new Spamhaus blacklist. The Exploits Block List (XBL) would contain a constantly updated database of “proxy” computers that had been hacked, infected, or otherwise misconfigured to allow spammers to commandeer them. Spamhaus would gather the data from two existing third-party blacklists and make the XBL available for free to mail server operators.

Linford knew the XBL wouldn’t eliminate the problem of spam zombies. But he felt it was spam opponents’ best defense against the constantly growing arsenal controlled by spammer-hackers.

In the criminal contempt case of U.S. v. Jason Vale, defense attorney Jason Vale called his first and only witness: himself.

After being sworn in that morning of July 17, 2003, the former Laetrile spammer took the stand and began telling jurors the amazing story of how he had beaten cancer by eating apricot seeds. Vale started by explaining how, at the age of fifteen, he had felt something growing in his back.^[11]

Judge John Gleeson of New York’s Eastern District Court stopped Vale right there. The judge instructed the jury that the case before them was not about the benefits or disadvantages of cancer treatments. What was at issue, he said, was whether Vale had violated the April 2000 injunction prohibiting him from selling any form of Laetrile, also known as B₁₇.

“It doesn’t matter to the charge of criminal contempt whether B₁₇ is a good thing or a bad thing. A person has to comply with the injunction,” said Judge Gleeson.

Vale cautiously returned to his story. He told about how in 1996 he started selling apricot seeds and a video called “All About Cancer” over the Internet. And then he discovered how to send spam.

“I emailed to the whole world. I said the answer to cancer is ‘no,’ and I kept emailing out,” he told the courtroom. “But then some people who got the spams started to complain. They forwarded the emails to the F.D.A....There is a whole political group out there that doesn’t like spamming, but I was on a mission. I didn’t care. Plus, I learned the technique of emailing out. It might be annoying to someone to press delete when they get the spamming, but the answer to cancer was ‘no.’”

Vale tried to quickly sum up how he had gotten into his current legal predicament. But it was hard to condense several years into a neat, coherent story. He rambled on for a few minutes about the mixed legal advice he had received and about the ambiguity of the law. At one point he apologized for slurring his words and explained that he had broken his teeth as a child.

“You are just talking too fast. You sound fine,” said the judge.

A week before the trial, Judge Gleeson had tried to persuade Vale, who had no legal training, not to handle the case “pro se,” as his own defense lawyer. In a July 10 hearing, the judge had told Vale such trials almost always result in convictions.

But Vale had lost faith in the expensive lawyers he had retained earlier in the case, so he had dismissed them. Vale arranged to have an attorney advise him in the courtroom. However, Vale’s “standby” counsel was not allowed to examine witnesses or make statements to the jury. Also at the defense table with Vale was a lawyer from the Legal Aid office. Vale told the judge he was shocked to learn that she hadn’t even heard of the federal DSEA (Dietary Supplement Education Act). How, he wondered, could she possibly be of any assistance?

Judge Gleeson said that the fact that Vale’s Legal Aid counsel wasn’t familiar with some acronym was a “horrible” reason for him to “expose” himself by representing himself. “But, sir,” the judge had said, “if that is your choice, I will let you do it.”^[12]

At the start of the trial, the government began its case with a review of the facts. Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Kleinberg told the jury how, after Judge Gleeson had issued the preliminary injunction against Vale in April 2000, Vale hadn’t actually stopped selling Laetrile.

“He thought he could pull a fast one...in flagrant disregard of the court order,” Kleinberg told the jury.

Vale had, in fact, stopped spamming for apricot seeds and other Laetrile-related products. He stuck primarily to mass-emailing ads for other herbal products, such as willow flower for urination and prostate problems, coral calcium for stronger bones, and noni seed juice for “cellular rejuvenating enzymes.” And the ordering page at Vale’s ChristianBrothers.com web site no longer listed Laetrile products as of May 2000.

But according to Kleinberg, the top of Vale’s web page advised visitors to call a toll-free number “for questions about apricot seeds.” When Food and Drug Administration (FDA) undercover investigators phoned the number to inquire about purchasing Laetrile, they were informed that Christian Brothers no longer handled such products. Potential customers were referred instead to a firm named Praise Distributing based in Phoenix, Arizona.

Kleinberg told the courtroom that records on file with the Arizona Secretary of State showed that Jason Vale was behind Praise Distributing. In December 1999, he had registered the corporate name Christian Nutriments, listing himself as president. A few months later, he had changed the company’s name to Praise Distributing and listed his grandmother as president. Digging further, investigators discovered that the address on file for Praise was simply a mailbox service that forwarded to Vale’s home in New York. Records showed that Vale had paid for the mailbox with his credit card.

In October 2000, Kleinberg revealed, investigators from the FDA and the U.S. Postal Service decided to crack Vale’s shell corporation. Armed with a search warrant, they conducted a surprise inspection of Vale’s Queens, New York, home.

“The agents literally caught the defendant with his hand in the apricot seed jar,” Kleinberg said to the jury.

In the basement of the house, inspectors found 15,000 Laetrile tablets, enough to treat one person for 200 years. Plastic tubs in the basement also stored over 100,000 apricot seeds, a quantity that would last a single person forty-two years. Investigators also found more than 2,000 vials of injectable B₁₇. Other damning evidence included outgoing packages, all bearing Praise’s Arizona return address, as well as invoices from suppliers addressed to Praise. While searching the basement, FDA agents used a cell phone to dial Praise’s toll-free number. To no one’s surprise, a telephone on the desk in the basement rang when they called.

Armed with the evidence, prosecutors had no trouble convincing Judge Gleeson to make his preliminary injunction against Christian Brothers permanent. In November 2000, he permanently banned Vale from directly or indirectly promoting or selling Laetrile.

Kleinberg took a step toward the jury box. “But did the defendant keep his word this second time around?” he asked, gesturing toward Vale. After a pause, Kleinberg answered his own question. “Not a chance,” he said.

Then Kleinberg explained how Vale, with the help of his family, quickly made plans to resume selling Laetrile under a new front, Cyto International. In January 2001, one of Vale’s employees phoned Woodland Nut, the California wholesaler that had supplied Christian Brothers with apricot seeds. Vale’s employee ordered 500 pounds of the seeds on behalf of Cyto, with instructions for Woodland to ship them to a tire and auto center in Queens. A few days later, once the order was en route, the employee phoned the trucking company and changed the delivery address to the camera shop run by Vale’s father in Corona, New York.

“As any fan of dime store novels will tell you,” said Kleinberg, “you don’t change taxicabs in the middle of a trip unless you want to make sure that you are not being followed.”

According to Kleinberg, Vale used the same trick to order even larger shipments of apricot seeds in February and March 2001—all in an effort to throw investigators off his path.

“That, ladies and gentlemen, is a crime. It’s called contempt of court,” said Kleinberg as he concluded his opening statement.

When it was Vale’s turn, Judge Gleeson provided him with plenty of gentle coaching. But Vale still had trouble mounting much of a defense. He seemed lost while cross-examining government witnesses and had no real witnesses of his own. Vale had hoped to get testimony from a friend who had purchased seeds from him in the past. But the friend failed to show up at the court to testify, forcing Vale to rest his defense. The one witness he did call to the stand was a friend from church whom he had spotted in the courtroom. After the surprised acquaintance was sworn in, Vale struggled to come up with questions and soon abandoned his intended character witness.

In his closing argument, Vale was clearly unprepared for the verbal challenge. Using an overhead projector, he attempted to persuade jurors that the language of the court’s injunction was ambiguous. But Vale’s own bizarre syntax often stood in his way, such as when he tried to criticize the government’s inspection of his home and its failure to send him a letter warning that he was in possible violation of the injunction:

Vale wound up his summation with a plea to jurors to “decide justice” and to understand that he did not “knowingly and willfully” disobey the law.

“I pray you find me innocent so that I can go back and do the things the right way and continue with my life and not go to jail for fifteen...whatever. Thank you,” Vale concluded.

On the morning of July 21, 2003, as the jury was sequestered to begin the second day of its deliberations, Kleinberg informed Judge Gleeson and the other counsel of a startling development. Someone outside the courthouse had been handing out pamphlets claiming that jurors had a Constitutional right to ignore the government’s evidence under a process known as jury nullification. The pamphlets implored jurors instead to “vote their conscience.”

Judge Gleeson was livid. “Does anybody know anything about this?” he demanded.

Vale immediately piped up. “I didn’t do it.”

“Do you know who did it?” asked the judge.

“Someone I know did it,” Vale admitted. “They handed out First Amendment literature, your honor. It doesn’t say my name on it.”

Judge Gleeson glared at Vale. “There’s nothing First Amendment about it. It’s an inappropriate attempt to influence a verdict in a criminal case ... if anybody in the courtroom does that, I’m going to direct the marshals to arrest you on the spot. It’s an outrage,” he said.

At a loss about how to handle the unusual situation, the judge decided to query jury members about whether they had seen the handout. Three jurors admitted they had been given what appeared to be slightly different copies of the pamphlet. The judge reminded them individually of their duty to heed the instructions he gave at the start of the trial, and to decide the facts in accordance with the law.

“It’s a bunch of baloney,” Judge Gleeson said of the pamphlet to one of the jurors who had a copy in her handbag. “Can you continue to perform your function as a juror?” he asked.

“I suppose I can,” she replied.

Apparently satisfied with her answer, the judge sent the juror back to the jury room. Then he turned to Vale’s standby counsel.

“Why shouldn’t I remand Mr. Vale?” the judge asked.

The attorney replied that he hadn’t had an opportunity to gather information about the incident, and he requested more time before the judge made a decision to take Vale into custody. Judge Gleeson agreed to give Vale’s standby counsel until 5 p.m. that day to prepare an explanation for what the judge said was “a naked effort to improperly influence a jury.”

But the court never got a chance to hear more about Vale’s involvement in the leafleting effort. At 4 p.m., the foreperson sent the judge a note saying the jury had reached a verdict. Vale was found guilty on all three counts of criminal contempt.

After the judge dismissed the jury, Vale’s attorney requested that Vale be allowed to remain free pending his sentencing, perhaps under some form of house arrest. In response, Kleinberg forcefully argued that Vale should be detained.

According to Kleinberg, “the events of today sort of stand alone. They are in a category beyond anything I’ve seen. And maybe my experience is limited, but the defendant is responsible for just total and complete disregard for this court’s orders...it makes him both a flight risk and a danger to the community.”

At that point, Vale’s attorney tried a new line of argument: his client was beset by mental problems that affected his conduct during the trial.

“I would be able to come forward with certain psychiatric evidence to show that, in fact, there may have been some aspects of this that were affected by diminished capacity,” said the attorney. “There’s medical conditions going on here...there’s a variety of conditions that would soften what’s going on.”

“I can’t trust you,” said the judge to Vale. “This very case is about contempt. It’s about a refusal, knowingly and willingly, to abide by a court order.” With that, the judge set Vale’s sentencing for the third week of October 2003. Then he ordered marshals to take Vale into custody.

Vale was booked into the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, the same facility that held tickling-fetish spammer David D’Amato in 2001. While awaiting his sentencing, Vale was informed that the court had determined he defrauded the U.S. government by claiming he qualified for Legal Aid. In September 2003, Vale was ordered to reimburse the government $31,590 for the costs of his appointed defense attorney.

Vale’s October 2003 sentencing date would come and go. As the result of numerous postponements, Vale would remain behind bars awaiting sentencing for nearly twelve months. It wasn’t until June 2004 that he would learn his fate.

In May 2003, millions of Internet users got a refreshing break from the run-of-the-mill spam that routinely invaded their email in-boxes. Instead of hawking mortgages, penis-enlargement pills, or weight-loss products, an email arrived that seemed straight out of a science-fiction novel.^[13]

The message offered $5,000 to any vendor capable of promptly delivering a collection of far-fetched gadgets for conducting time travel, including an “Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement” and an “AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor.”

Dave Hill, a software programmer in Iowa, normally deleted a couple dozen junk emails every day with hardly a glance. But when he received the time-travel solicitation, he hit the reply button instead. Hill sent the spammer a message saying he could get him what he wanted. With a little deft photo-editing, Hill created a fake online store with all the sci-fi items sought by the would-be time-traveler. In July, Hill even shipped an old hard-drive motor disguised as a “warp generator” to a Massachusetts address provided by the spammer, who said his name was Bob White.

When White gratefully acknowledged receipt of the parts a few days later and earnestly asked for help obtaining others, Hill decided to end the stunt. He had expected White to tell him that it was all a joke. But instead White seemed totally serious about his quest for time travel and in need of psychological help.

Hill was not the first Internet user to be drawn into the strange world of the mysterious man some refer to as the time-travel spammer. Since 2001, people have posed as aliens, time-travel equipment vendors, and intergalactic policemen—anything to feed the imagination of the strange spam’s sender. The odd interplay began in November 2001, when someone calling himself Robby sent millions of emails with the subject line, “Time Travelers PLEASE HELP.”

The three-page, single-spaced message began, “Here is a brief description of my life,” and went on to describe how the author had been drugged and poisoned as a child by Denise, a woman his divorced father had dated.

“I and also my Mom made my dad break up with her...My dad never believed me about her or what she did, or the side effects I had from her poisonings. I am 21 now, and since then my life has been obviously completely tampered with. I believe she is the link,” he wrote. Robby’s message then described how, one morning after taking a shower, he noticed UFOs in the sky and suddenly saw a flash of white light.

“It seemed as if I rotated slightly with this tremendous force on my body and everything went blank for a second. The air was warm and dry for that quick second. I heard this click which sounded like a camera. And then it was over,” he wrote. When Robby went to wake up his mother and tell her what had happened, she pointed out that it was 12:30 in the morning, and he should go back to bed.

“This was all real, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that time travel is possible for me. I believe it happened as a sign that I am meant for time travel as an only option to correct what has been done to my life,” wrote Robby. He concluded his message with an appeal to readers.

“I believe that God is leading me to a time traveler who can help me with the type of time travel needed. Please I am dying! The sooner we can get started the better,” he wrote.

Some Internet users speculated on discussion lists that Robby was actually a sci-fi author in search of material. Others suggested the time-travel messages were just a cunning way for spammers to harvest working email addresses. The more common assumption was that the unidentified author of the emails was just out for fun. To play along, a few pranksters even created fake eBay auctions in response to the messages.

But one person who received Robby’s message found something haunting about the strange cry for help. Brendan Milburn, a member of the New York jazz-rock trio GrooveLily, penned a tune about it. “Rewind” was released on the band’s 2003 album, Are We There Yet. It goes like this:

It wasn’t until August of 2003 that fans of the time-travel spams learned they were actually the work of a 22-year-old Woburn, Massachusetts, man named James R. Todino.

“Robby,” it turned out, was dead serious about his desire to rewind time. He lived at home with his mother, who was divorced from his father, an electrician living in nearby Billerica. Robby’s psychological problems—he had been diagnosed with dissociative disorder and mild schizophrenia—prevented him from holding down most jobs, unless they involved working at home on the computer.

His parents had long ago given up trying to argue with Robby about time travel. But they worried that he wasn’t very street-smart and was easily manipulated. Some people had tried to take advantage of his gullibility and had sold him phony equipment. Others strung him along with long telephone calls and emails that only exacerbated his torment.

But although Todino’s time-travel messages made him appear fragile and unstable, he was a remarkably competent and hardheaded spammer. Years before his first time-travel emails, Todino had been sending out garden-variety spams for everything from “free” government grants to “detective” software. Todino had discovered the junk email business just prior to graduating from Shawsheen Valley Technical High School in 1999, where he studied welding and culinary arts. In March 1999, he mass-emailed a “chain mail” scam that attempted to trick naïve recipients into sending him five dollars. Later that year, Todino registered a handful of web sites under the company name RT Marketing and began spamming for a variety of products.

By November 2000, Todino was on Shiksaa’s radar. After his web sites were repeatedly shut down for spamming, he broadcast some emails searching for someone to sell him a “bulk friendly” T1 line. Posing as a potential supplier, Shiksaa contacted him over AOL Instant Messenger.

“You need a T1?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“OK, how much can you pay? What is your company? I know a guy, but he’ll want to know what you want it for,” she said.

“My company is RT Marketing...I am willing to pay triple as much as a regular T1 connection if you can keep me up,” said Todino.

“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

“Well, basically, I will not be mailing through my T1 connection. I just need the T1 to make my website accessible to the Internet. It will generate complaints, but they will not violate your terms of service,” he explained.

Todino gave Shiksaa his real name and phone number, after which she said her friend “Ronnie” would be in touch.

Less than a year later, in August 2001, officials from the Massachusetts attorney general’s office were knocking on Todino’s door. In the state’s first legal action against a spammer, Todino and his company RT Marketing were accused of sending misleading and deceptive ads. Regulators pointed out that Todino’s “grant program” was just a list of grant organizations, and the “detective” software was just a list of informational web sites found on the Internet. The state fined Todino $5,000 and convinced him to sign an “assurance of discontinuance” deal, under which he agreed to stop sending fraudulent bulk emails.

But Todino hardly seemed intimidated by the Massachusetts order. Within weeks, he was spamming again under a new company name, PK Marketing, and using more sophisticated techniques to conceal his identity.

Shortly thereafter, Todino’s first wave of time-travel spam hit the Internet. It was as if his run-in with the government had somehow triggered the strange quest. Over time, his messages became increasingly specific about the technology he needed to rewind his life. In February 2002, he sent a flurry of anonymous messages appealing to anyone who was a “time traveler or alien disguised as human.” The spams stated that his life had been “severely tampered with” and he needed “temporal reversion” to correct it.

“If you can help me, I will pay for your teleport or trip down here, along with hotel stay, food and all expenses. I will pay top dollar for the equipment. Proof must be provided,” stated the messages.

Todino accumulated plenty of evidence that the equipment he needed was out there somewhere. Someone sent him a twenty-five-page manual entitled “Dimensional Warp Generator User’s Manual,” which was apparently created by cutting and pasting material from computer-hardware documentation. Someone else provided a couple automotive wiring diagrams that had been doctored so that they appeared to be time-travel equipment schematics. Others emailed Todino photos of souped up digital watches, apparently meant to look like portable time machines.

Not everyone wanted to help Todino acquire the technology he desired. In August 2002, he got an email, sent from a Hotmail account, with the subject line “Time Travel.” It notified Todino that the author was responsible for monitoring “electronic communications.” The email warned him to “stop all forms of communication on this topic” and said Todino would be arrested by an agent and returned after receiving a “cranosistanic reversal.” Todino was informed to delete the email after reading it, or else be in violation of “Dimensional Displacement Diversion Act of section 44563b-232 Article 40498.442.”

To Todino, the emails, phone calls, and documents were further proof that members of a conspiracy, which he referred to as the Renns, were trying to follow his every move and control his life, including his use of the Internet. The information made him more determined than ever to raise the money he’d need to finance his trip back in time.

PK Marketing’s commercial spamming reached a peak in late spring of 2003, when Todino broadcast millions of messages advertising “free cash grants” at his site GrantGiveAwayProgram.com. It was around this time that Todino met Davis Hawke (whom he knew as Dave Bridger) at the BulkersClub.com forum.

At the time, Hawke was looking to make some extra money subletting some of the web hosting he had paid for in South America. In a note at the spammer site, “Dave Bridger” advertised “extremely solid” web hosting and boasted that he’d experienced “about 24 hours of downtime in the last three weeks, and we’ve been up for about five months with no problems.” Bridger said he used “DNS floating and IP rotation via proxies” to completely hide the origin of a server, “so it NEVER gets blacklisted or shut down.” The price for Bridger’s hosting service was $150 for a trial week and $250 per week after that.

After Todino sent him $150 by PayPal, Bridger set up PK Marketing with access to one of Amazing Internet’s domains, Pharycon.com. Todino then modified his ads for “free government grants” to list the domain. Later, Hawke also gave him access to Zakarish.com, a site that Hawke also rented out to some spammers who were selling access to pornographic web cams.

As part of his new effort to hide his identity, Todino often listed other people’s email addresses in the “From” line of his spams. In the middle of May 2003, he sent out millions of ads with a forged return address belonging to a web site with information about Cairo, Egypt. When Philippe Simard, one of the operators of the site, egy.com, began receiving bounce notices and complaints, he fought back by convincing PK Marketing’s credit card processor to shut down its account.

Simard also put up a page at the site explaining that egy.com was not responsible for the spams. The page included a copy of the domain registration for pharycon.com, leading many people to assume that Hawke and Bournival were responsible for the forged messages. Unfortunately for Dr. Fatburn, it was one of the registrations in which Hawke had also put Alan Moore’s name, so some of the heat was directed his way as well.

All the commotion over the Joe-job made it impossible for Todino to hide his secret any longer. In August 2003, inquisitive Internet users and reporters fingered the longtime spammer as the source of the time-travel emails.^[14] In response, Spamhaus added Todino to the Rokso list, and his record on Spews was updated with the new information.

Several weeks later, an avalanche of what appeared to be retaliatory messages began hitting three anti-spam web sites that had spotlighted Todino as the author of the time-travel spams. Someone had forged the sites’ domains as the return addresses on a recent flurry of junk emails advertising anti-spam software. As a result, the innocent sites were inundated with hundreds of thousands of error messages and complaints about the spam.

The messages, which bore subject lines such as “Stop Spam in Its Tracks” and “Say Goodbye to Junk Email,” advertised Quickeasysolution.com as the source of an anti-spam software program.

Among the targets of the Joe-job attack was Interesting-People.org, the home of a mailing list moderated by Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor David Farber. The site was slammed with hundreds of thousands of bounce messages from all over the Internet. Similarly, Inertramblings.com, a blog run by Sean Sosik-Hamor, received over 350,000 of the error messages. The operator of Lindqvist.com, Niklas Lindqvist, who was the third victim, reported receiving 30,000 such messages in six hours.

All three sites had published articles about the time-travel spammer’s unmasking. But it wasn’t certain that Todino was responsible for the Joe-job. The domain advertised in the spams, QuickEasySolution.com, listed a fictitious Woburn, Massachusetts, street address—the same address Todino had given in previous domain registrations. However, it was possible that Todino himself was the victim of an elaborate Joe-job.

But at least one of the attack victims was confident Todino was to blame. In a message on his site, Sosik-Hamor said he had previously been a fan of the strange messages about time travel. “I’ve thought that the author was pretty cool. A few fries short of a Happy Meal, but cool...Now I feel almost betrayed by Robert,” he wrote.

The next day, Todino broke his silence. He changed the home page of QuickEasySolution.com, replacing the ad for “Email Filter” with a new page. On it, Todino denied being responsible for the Joe-job and apologized to the victims. “There are those wishing to do me greater harm then you can possibly comprehend,” he said.

Todino eventually took down the page and went back to hawking anti-spam software and government grants. But he stopped sending time-travel spams.

Around Labor Day 2003, Shiksaa’s outrage at The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (Marin, Richter, Waggoner, and company) finally began to fade. She would never forgive them for publishing her and her dad’s personal information on the Internet. But it appeared that the spammers’ litigation against her and the rest of the Nanae Nine had imploded.

On September 3, the mysterious EMarketersAmerica.org (EMA) voluntarily withdrew its lawsuit after realizing it was about to backfire horribly. The EMA had hoped to sue anti-spammers into unmasking the operators of Spews. But it became clear that the lawsuit would expose EMA members’ own operations to the same risk. Pete Wellborn, the attorney representing the defendants, had been crowing that he would use the legal discovery process to thoroughly dissect the companies responsible for the litigation.

The day after Wellborn filed a withering 110-page motion to dismiss, EMA attorney Mark Felstein waved his white flag. It was the second humiliation for Felstein in recent months. In June, the New York Bar Association had denied the Florida lawyer’s petition for admittance, citing Felstein’s history of substance abuse and criminal record. “We are not satisfied that petitioner presently possesses the character and general fitness requisite for an attorney and counselor-at-law,” wrote the state’s Supreme Court panel.^[15]

But Wellborn and his clients weren’t going to be content with a Pyrrhic victory. They wanted to send a clear message to spammers who launch legal attacks: don’t start what you can’t finish. Wellborn tried to persuade the court to refuse Felstein’s withdrawal and instead decide the suit on its merits. Wellborn argued that federal law prohibited a plaintiff from unilaterally withdrawing a lawsuit once the defendant has answered the charges.

Meanwhile, Steve Linford announced on Nanae that the defendants wanted Felstein to pay their legal fees. “We’re going after Felstein personally for every penny. He’s whining he’s broke, but that’s not going to wash. He can sell his house,” wrote Linford, who then posted a copy of the 1998 sales record for Felstein’s condominium, which anti-spammers had apparently located in an online database.

Shiksaa’s relatively ebullient mood darkened a few weeks later. The October 2003 issue of Conde Nast’s magazine for men, Details, published its annual list of the ten most influential and powerful men under thirty-eight. To the dismay of anti-spammers, OptInRealBig.com CEO Scott Richter was number nine on the list, which also included rapper Eminem and actor Ben Affleck.

“Ninth largest spamming scumbag, maybe,” wrote Shiksaa in a Nanae discussion of the Details list. When someone observed that Richter seemed to be adept at generating publicity, she dismissed the idea. “Most psychopaths are good at self-promotion. If you don’t believe that, just Google the name of a certain Florida lawyer,” she said. Taking some of the sting away for Shiksaa and the others was a quote about Richter from Linford that made it into the Details article: “The only power he has is the power to annoy 100 million people.”

Then more bad news for the Nanae Nine arrived. In October, Florida district court judge Donald Middlebrooks granted Felstein’s motion to dismiss.^[16] The EMA case was closed.

Stuck with thousands of dollars in legal bills and still smarting from Richter’s adulation in the mainstream media, Shiksaa and her codefendants got an even more stunning piece of news in late November.

According to a new entry in the Spamhaus Rokso record for Scott Richter, three “former spamfighters” had been discovered on Richter’s payroll: former MAPS employees Kelly Molloy (Thompson) and Pete Popovich, as well as Ohio anti-spammer Karen Hoffmann. The Rokso entry, ROK2888, stated that the three were employed by Richter to handle network abuse complaints and to perform “listwashing”—the task of removing angry spam recipients from OptInRealBig.com’s mailing lists.

The Rokso entry said Molloy and Popovich had been hired by Richter in January 2003 as part of his “continuing efforts to appear legitimate,” which represented “a depressing reversal of ethics” according to the anti-spammers.

“Although their employment by Richter was initially presented as salutory [sic], in that their work would eventually clean up Richter’s operation, it has long since become clear that they are complicit in his activities,” stated ROK2888. The entry added that Karen Hoffman, “turned away in her pursuit of spammer Thomas Cowles,” had also joined Richter’s company in an “abuse position.” A footnote on the page stated, “in Richter’s lexicon, ‘abuse personnel’ denotes not persons who counteract abuse but those who facilitate it.”

Although the author of the Rokso entry was never revealed, news of its publication was first announced on Nanae by Adam Brower, who had recently been added to the Spamhaus team. The announcement set off a flurry of discussion, generating over 400 responses. Some people accused the former anti-spammers of being traitors. One person said Richter’s abuse personnel were just as culpable as getaway drivers in a bank robbery. But others rose to defend Molloy and Popovich, and supported their efforts to clean up Richter’s operation from the inside. They said the Rokso record was unfairly vindictive and undermined the register’s credibility.

A few hours later, ROK2888 was pulled from the Spamhaus site. In a note on Nanae, Linford explained that the record would be placed back online after Molloy and Popovich were removed. Karen Hoffmann, on the other hand, would remain. “The info on our internal list,” explained Linford, “says Karen Hoffman is fully and knowingly involved in Richter’s spam operations.”

The Spamhaus team learned that Hoffmann had been consulting to Richter since at least early 2003 and had apparently taken great pains to conceal the fact. When spam recipients emailed OptInRealBig.com to complain, she used a number of pseudonyms in her replies, including the name “Karen Hughes.” Hoffmann had also used the name Hughes, which wasn’t her maiden name, to register for the annual meeting of a technical association called the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). Hoffmann traveled to the Chicago meeting in October with Richter’s computer whiz kid and head of information technology, Dustin Parker, and had listed WholesaleBandwith, Inc. as her company’s name. (Richter had recently acquired WholesaleBandwith from a Rokso spammer in Texas named Paul Boes. The company had been booted off over a half-dozen Internet service providers since 2002.)

When the information about her work for Richter finally became public, Hoffmann didn’t deny it. She waded into the turbulent discussion on Nanae with a note stating that she wouldn’t discuss the details of her employment. (Richter made it a point to get all employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement upon their hiring.) But she defended Richter’s practices, noting that several large Internet service providers had “white-listed” him and were allowing his messages to reach their subscribers.

“I’ve always believed we need a middle ground. There’s got to be a compromise. Give them a set of rules to play by. Make sure they play by the rules. Don’t want their email at all? Feel free to block them. They’re not going away,” she wrote.

Hoffmann pointed out that some anti-spammers had known of her affiliation with Richter long ago. Indeed, she had hinted at her new employment in a May 2003 statement at her personal web site, ToledoCyberCafe.com. In the update to her chronicle of tracking Empire Towers spammer Tom Cowles, Hoffmann revealed she had started to take a broader view about the best way to fight spam.

“I’m working behind the scenes with marketers to help them improve their practices. I’m working with consumers and corporations on utilizing technology to stop the spam from hitting their inboxes...I feel it is in everyone’s best interests to work with marketers, consumers, ISPs, and lawmakers alike to keep email a valuable communication tool,” she wrote.

But Shiksaa could barely contain her disgust at learning of Hoffmann’s association with Richter. When an anonymous person (who later turned out to be a Richter employee) posted a note to Nanae defending Hoffmann and pointing out her work to stop Tom Cowles, Shiksaa dismissed her former friend’s contributions to spam fighting.

“Following Cowles around with a camera and publishing other people’s research on her web page didn’t stop Cowles, nor did it stop any spam. The only thing she is doing to stop spam is removing spam victims who complain from Richter’s spam lists...and the whole while passing herself off in this newsgroup as a person who didn’t like spam,” wrote Shiksaa.

It was Hoffmann’s duplicity that bothered Shiksaa the most. Molloy and Popovich didn’t announce their Richter affiliation with a bullhorn either. But at least they didn’t try to hide it or resort to using aliases in their work for the spammer. (Molloy and Popovich would resign their posts with Richter soon after the Rosko incident.) Nanae regulars never take kindly to “sock puppets”—pseudonymous participants who jump into the newsgroup to defend spammers. But Shiksaa was especially astonished to learn that several Nanae postings by a person calling herself Natasha Dorenkov were actually the work of Hoffmann.

Identifying herself as an abuse coordinator for the MyEmailWizard bulk emailing service, Dorenkov had posted a note to Nanae that April. She requested that Spews reconsider her company’s place on the blacklist. When an anti-spammer asked whether her firm had any affiliation with Scott Richter, Dorenkov replied, “Without checking first with our legal department, I think I can safely say that Mr. Richter is an ex-list owner on our system.” Then, after being asked whether that was her real name, she responded, “Dorenkov is my married name, although I am no longer married. My given name is Nataliya Byakov. I’ve always gone by Natasha.”

It was all fabrication. In fact, Natasha Dorenkov was an alias Hoffmann had been using to shield herself while handling abuse complaints for Richter’s various properties (MyEmailWizard being one of them). Hoffmann wasn’t proud of her dissembling on Nanae. But she was quite satisfied with her achievements in Natasha’s name. To spam victims who emailed Richter’s companies asking to get off mailing lists, Natasha was something of a heroine. Many average Internet users had been conditioned not to trust opt-out instructions or communications with “abuse” personnel at spam firms. But dealing with Natasha was different. Hoffmann, as Natasha, was always quick to deal with spam complaints and treated spam victims with sympathy.

Yet after Hoffmann was added to Rokso, and Shiksaa confronted her about using the alias Natasha, Hoffmann at first denied it. That proved to be a mistake on many levels. As proof that Hoffmann had been hiding behind the pseudonym, Shiksaa produced a snippet of an AIM conversation between Hoffmann and another Internet user, whose screen name Shiksaa had redacted. In the brief exchange, “Karen Hughes” jokingly told the unidentified person that she was “Natasha.”

When she saw the evidence Shiksaa posted on Nanae, Hoffmann was mortified, and not just because she realized it was incontrovertible. Hoffman recognized the conversation; she had been chatting with Dustin Parker at the time. Clearly, Parker had betrayed Hoffmann and had given Shiksaa a copy of the log file of their chat. Hoffmann wondered what else Parker had shared with Shiksaa.

By December 2003, Hoffmann had her own entry on the Spews blacklist. Spews listing S2938 stated that she was “an anti-spammer gone bad” and called her “spammer Scott Richter’s list-washer.” Besides ListSupport.net, Spews listing S2938 also included the address of her personal site, ToledoCyberCafe.com. Hoffman’s Spews entry even contained the IP address of her cable modem service from Buckeye Express.

Hoffmann thought it petty of Spews to black-hole ToledoCyberCafe.com. But what bothered her most was the mystery of how Spews had gotten the cable modem’s IP address. She had been very careful not to disclose it in the headers of her newsgroup and email postings and always used her AOL account to post messages. And, as far as she knew, AOL Instant Messenger wouldn’t reveal her cable modem’s IP address to others.

Hoffmann ran a search for the IP address in all of the text files on her computer. The only place it showed up was in an AIM chat with Parker, in which she had intentionally sent him the IP number. Obviously, that chat log file was among those Parker had given to Shiksaa. But that still left the question of how Spews had gotten her IP address. Somehow it had gone from Shiksaa’s hands to the blacklist operators.

As Hoffmann saw it, there were only two possibilities: either Shiksaa had given it to someone connected to Spews, or Shiksaa herself was directly involved with the blacklist.^[17]

When Scott Richter tried to reach Dustin Parker on his company cell phone one Saturday in early November 2003, the sultry voice of a sex-chat-service operator answered instead. Assuming he had misdialed the number, Richter hung up and again tried phoning Parker, the head of information technology at OptInRealBig. But the call went through to the sex line the second time as well.^[18]

This was not a good thing. Richter and other company personnel routinely gave out Parker’s number to major customers who needed after-hours technical support or other customer service. Richter’s first impulse was to blame anti-spammers. The previous spring, someone had apparently hacked into OptinRealBig’s telephone network switch. The hackers enabled a feature that caused the twenty-four phones in the building to begin ringing all at once. Employees had to unplug their telephones for several hours while the company tried to solve the problem.

But anti-spammers weren’t responsible for the latest telephone prank. When Richter finally reached Parker on his private line, the 18-year-old admitted he had set up his company cell phone to forward to the sex line. Parker said he did it as a joke. But Richter soon realized that Parker had a different goal in mind. He wanted customers to think OptInRealBig was going out of business.

After picking up his last paycheck on November 7, Parker had joined a mutiny by six key OptInRealBig employees. Parker, the kid who had been Richter’s right hand from the start, and into whose PayPal account the two had dumped their first Internet sales, had walked off the job and apparently taken confidential company information with him. Parker, whose name was listed on many of OptInRealBig’s domains and who had even lived in Richter’s house at one point, was sabotaging the company he helped build. Parker, the mini-Richter—just five-eight, but checking in at around 200 pounds—had double-crossed his mentor in order to work for a new boss, OptInRealBig’s former sales manager, Jeff Perreault.

Perreault, 30, had been with Richter a long time too. Richter had listed him as the company’s manager when they incorporated OptInRealBig.com LLC shortly after the 9/11 American flag spams. He even made Perreault a 10-percent owner of the firm. But after several months of missing sales targets, Perreault was fired by Richter in October 2003. Richter offered to keep him on as an independent contractor and gave him $10,000 in severance pay when Perreault accepted the deal in writing a week later.

Richter had no idea Perreault would so blatantly breach the contract. The former sales manager, along with Parker and the four other OptInRealBig employees, had quietly set up Avalanche Denver Internet Marketing, their own spamming operation, soon after leaving Richter’s firm. Perreault promised that, unlike OptInRealBig, the new company would distribute its winnings more equitably. But first, they’d need some customers. Working from an office Perreault had set up in Denver, the crew was on the phones to prospects, most of them gleaned from stolen copies of OptInRealBig’s customer list. They told prospects that Richter’s firm couldn’t function without Parker and was likely going under. Some OptInRealBig customers decided to make the switch.^[19]

On their way out the door of OptInRealBig, Parker and his colleagues had grabbed several goodies besides the customer list, including a couple of computer hard drives, the company’s financial records, and some proprietary software, including OptInRealBig’s program for automatically removing spam recipients from mailing lists, as well as the complete database of email addresses generated by the program.

Richter also had reason to believe that before Parker left the company, he had set up OptInRealBig’s mail server to intercept email addressed to Richter or his father, the corporate counsel. Records showed that Parker had also tapped into other email accounts to access confidential information. Then there was the report from Hoffmann that Parker had sent copies of his IM logs to Shiksaa, in a clear breach of his nondisclosure agreement. Richter knew there was no telling what kind of information Parker was feeding the anti-spammers. (In fact, Parker had also revealed to Shiksaa he was the one who had “photoshopped” the images of her condo after Richter had given him the photos.)^[20]

Richter contacted his attorney in Denver and began working up a lawsuit against Parker, Perreault, and the others. The plan was to hit them with breach of contract, business interference, trespass to chattels, and a slew of other charges. Richter wanted a court to issue a preliminary injunction that would stop the ex-employees from further sabotaging OptInRealBig’s business.

But at the beginning of December, Richter suddenly found himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit. Officials from the New York Attorney General’s office wanted to talk with him about several batches of spam that had been sent out from May through July of 2003 using proxies and fake headers. New York State prosecutors said they had traced the sites advertised in the spams to a New York company called Synergy6, which said it had subcontracted the emailing to Richter.

Richter knew New York’s Attorney General Eliot Spitzer was on the warpath against spammers. In February of that year, Spitzer had pulled off a successful lawsuit against another self-proclaimed “opt-in” email-marketing company. A federal court judge ruled that Monsterhut, a Niagara Falls, New York—based firm, was deceptively representing its service as “permission based” or “opt-in,” when in fact Monsterhut’s mailing lists contained millions of email addresses of consumers who had never asked to receive ads. The court permanently banned Monsterhut from engaging in such acts in the future.

In a conference call with Spitzer’s office, with Richter’s dad on the line in San Diego, Richter explained that OptInRealBig had never directly sent any messages for Synergy6 during the period in question. All the email was the work of one of his affiliates, a Texas company named Delta Seven. Richter explained that OptInRealBig had forwarded to Delta Seven the few complaints his company had received about the messages. He provided investigators with contact information for Delta Seven’s owners, Paul Boes and Denny Cole, and hoped that would be the end of his involvement in the matter.

But a week later, a certified letter arrived from New York. It announced that state regulators had commenced litigation against Richter, “among others.” The letter accused him of a variety of deceptive business practices, including email header forgery, as well as false advertising. A few days later, Richter got word that Microsoft was teaming up with New York on a parallel lawsuit, on the grounds that its Hotmail service had received potentially millions of the illegal spams.

The whole matter apparently grew out of a complaint filed by a Hotmail user in June 2003. After receiving several unsolicited emails for “free” offers from Synergy6, the Washington resident had reported the spam to Microsoft, with carbon copies to numerous agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Trade Commission, and even the International Criminal Police Organization, or Interpol.

Upon investigating the complaint, officials at Hotmail discovered that spam traps they had set up received over 8,000 copies of the messages advertising Synergy6 web sites between May and June of 2003. (The ads had been sent to unpublished addresses created by the service to track spammers, especially those who claimed recipients had opted to receive the messages.) The Synergy6 spams touted a variety of “free” gifts ranging from donuts and sunglasses to electric toothbrushes and a pornographic video entitled Girls Gone Wild.

In order to take advantage of the offers, consumers had to provide personal information at the coregistration sites, including demographic data, and consent to receive future mailings from Synergy6 or its partners. In most cases, consumers also had to make a purchase at one of Synergy6’s sites in order to qualify for the “free” gift. (The terms and conditions of Synergy6’s offer didn’t sugarcoat the fact that consumers who registered would have their information sold to “marketing partners.” Yet Synergy6 said it was not responsible for helping consumers get off the mailing lists of those third parties.)

After analyzing hundreds of spam samples, prosecutors determined that Delta Seven had routed the messages through proxy computers all over the world in an effort to protect the company’s identity and avoid spam blacklists. Out of the hundreds of proxies used by Delta Seven, scores were hacked or virus-infected computers operated by customers of Comcast and other cable companies.

As Richter awaited the details of the New York and Microsoft lawsuits, he decided to drop the hammer on Parker, Perreault, and the other defectors. On December 11, his attorney filed a sweeping lawsuit in Denver district court, requesting not only injunctive relief against the former employees but also punitive and compensatory damages.

Parker was badly shaken by the news. That day, he was pulled over by police a couple of blocks from Denver’s Pepsi Center sports arena and was charged with driving while his ability was impaired.^[21] Later, Parker contacted Shiksaa and pleaded with her to sign an affidavit saying he had never given her any AIM logs.

After Shiksaa refused to lie for Parker, the two didn’t chat again. But she was surprised to get an instant message from Richter around noon on December 17. He matter-of-factly informed her that the New York Attorney General and Microsoft were going to announce a lawsuit against him the next day.

“Should be good news for you guys to cover, since you all love me so much,” he said.

When Shiksaa asked for details, Richter told her Paul Boes of Delta Seven was really the target of the lawsuits. According to Richter, Boes was in trouble primarily for sending mail through proxies. Richter’s only involvement, as he explained it, was introducing Synergy6 to Delta Seven.

“No idea why I’m part of it,” said Richter, who claimed the lawsuit would actually end up helping him. “More press to show I did nothing wrong and don’t use proxies,” he said.

Shiksaa told Richter to keep her apprised of the details and then said goodbye. But as she thought over the matter later that afternoon, Shiksaa began to wonder whether Richter’s indifference to the lawsuit was justified. She knew that Boes and Richter had been business associates for years. Boes had sold his company, Wholesalebandwidth (WSB), to Richter that fall but had stayed on as a WSB customer. Shiksaa did a quick Usenet search and found a handful of reports from Internet users who had received spam from WSB throughout the summer. All of the reported spams contained bogus headers meant to look as if the messages originated from Hotmail or AOL. Such header forgery was obviously Boes’s modus operandi.

Shiksaa confronted Richter over AIM. “Scott, you knew Boes forges headers,” she said.^[22]

Richter replied that he never really looked closely at Boes’s messages. In any case, the spammer hadn’t been using Richter’s network since May, Richter claimed.

“Your abuse desk has nothing on him?” asked Shiksaa.

Richter said he hadn’t received any complaints about Boes. “I do not allow anyone doing illegal things,” he added.

Shiksaa cut and pasted some of the WSB spams she had located.

“You said he never forged while he was with you,” she told Richter. “I say you either are lying, or you haven’t bothered to read your abuse mailbox.”

“The last thing in the world I need to do is have someone doing something wrong on net space I’m on, as I know I’ll get the blame for it,” he said.

Shiksaa pasted a few more examples of WSB spam with forged headers. “Why do you continue to deny it?” she asked.

“I do not run the abuse department,” he replied.

“Then they knew it, and it went on for months.”

Richter paused a moment. “Susan, let me ask you this, and answer honestly...”

“I’m always honest.”

“What incentive do I have to throw anyone off? Spamhaus and Spews would never de-list me, right? As long as someone is not breaking a law, what is the point to get rid of business?” he asked.

Shiksaa couldn’t believe Richter’s swift about-face. “You are responsible to know what goes on in your company,” she said.

“I know how to promote and run a business, not a tech department.”

“And what’s Karen’s excuse?” asked Shiksaa, referring to WSB’s abuse department head, Karen Hoffmann. “She can read a header can she not? She was your employee. You are responsible.”

Before Richter could reply, Shiksaa came right back at him. “You know what? Just to repay you for publishing my father’s information out of spite, I’m going to make sure the attorney general’s office knows where to find proof of forgeries,” she said.

“Susan, I never forged, and I had nothing to do with your dad.”

“You published my father’s personal information out of malice. Now I’m going to repay that favor, Scott. Don’t contact me again. And I hope you get sued into oblivion.”

“Whatever,” was Richter’s only response.

As Richter predicted, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith held a joint press conference the next day in New York to announce their lawsuits. Spitzer began by describing the three respondents, referring to Richter as the third-largest spammer in the world. Then Spitzer zeroed in on the subject of header forgery. He noted that Microsoft’s spam traps had attracted over 8,000 spams from Scott Richter in a one-month period. All of the messages, according to Spitzer, contained bogus headers designed to evade the spam filters used by ISPs and computer end users.

All told, there were 40,000 “fraudulent statements” in the messages, said Spitzer. Then he announced his office’s intent to sue the spammers $500 for each fraudulent statement, or a total of twenty million dollars. The goal, he said, was to make other spammers realize their business was unviable.

“We will drive them into bankruptcy, and therefore others will not come into the marketplace to take their place,” he promised.

When Microsoft’s top lawyer Brad Smith took his turn at the podium, he announced the company’s intent to separately seek damages of eighteen million dollars from the spammers.

“If these people have any money left after the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit in New York comes to a close, we will be happy to pursue the remainder,” said Smith to laughter from the press corps.

During the question-and-answer period that followed, Spitzer was asked whether investigators had determined the profitability of the spammers’ businesses. He responded that Richter was “clearing several million dollars a month in profit,” and that the damages sought by Microsoft and New York would be “sufficient to wipe out whatever profit he has made.”

But one reporter wanted to know how a strong case could be built against Richter, since OptInRealBig apparently had farmed out the spamming to Delta Seven. Spitzer assured the media that prosecutors would be able to establish liability “up the chain of command...and prove without a doubt that those, including Richter...are liable for the misbehavior of those that actually stand there and push the buttons.”

New York prosecutors also released 619 pages of exhibits gathered in support of the complaint filed in New York Supreme Court. The evidence included dozens of email messages between employees of Synergy6 and OptInRealBig. The emails showed Richter deeply involved in the day-to-day operations of the Synergy6 spam campaign. In one exchange, Richter shrugged off Synergy6’s chief operating officer’s concerns that Delta Seven’s messages contained forged header information.

“We send out ten-million-plus emails a day, and you on average send me two complaints per day. I think one complaint per three million is real good,” said Richter, apparently unconcerned that the bogus headers in the messages made it extremely difficult for average Internet users to determine to whom they should complain.^[23]

New York’s exhibits also included hundreds of spam samples. The scores of sample spams from Delta Seven included the characters “wsb,” a special tracking code OptInRealBig had assigned to Delta Seven. But none of the message headers contained IP addresses assigned to networks directly operated by OptInRealBig.

After news outlets published an array of articles quoting Spitzer and Smith, Richter belatedly responded with a press release about the lawsuits. The argumentative statement bore little of the polish customarily found in corporate press releases on legal matters. It described the lawsuit as “one of the worst orchestrated smear campaigns against legitimate Internet business interests of recent times,” and said prosecutors hadn’t produced any evidence linking OptInRealBig to the illegal spams.

“If there were 10,000 false and fraudulent emails sent by Optin, it would be good legal practice if the Attorney General would see fit to attach at least one,” read the statement. It also criticized Spitzer’s “reliance on Spamhaus” as “a fatal error, because Spamhaus is an offshore, anonymous organization which has no legitimate connection with Internet businesses in the United States.” Richter’s press release concluded by saying OptInRealBig would vigorously defend itself in court and “prevail as one of the most legitimate Internet marketing institutions in the United States.”

Spam fighters reveled in the moment. The man they considered one of the most frustrating spammers in the world had finally met his comeuppance. But nearly everyone, including Shiksaa, was secretly worried about whether the charges against Richter would stick.