Spam Kings

I've been asked to start a topic dedicated to discussing some of the issues raised in my new book Spam Kings. (Alexandra Krasne covered many of the key questions in our recent interview.)

So, if you've got questions or comments about the people behind the junk email problem, fire away!

Brian McWilliams

I just read this article http://www.techsoup.org/news/news_article.cfm?newsid=1676&cg=content&sg=news1676 about notorious spammer Jeremy Jaynes who faces a 9 year prison term for concealing his identity. I thought this was awesome to hear! Any comments?

The jury's 9-year sentence for Jeremy Jaynes (aka Gaven Stubberfield) could very well be revised downward by the judge, who apparently expressed some skepticism during the trial. We'll find out sometime around February.

This was all made possible by a tough anti-spam law in Virginia. In recent days, Ohio has moved close to passing a similar law that criminalizes certain types of spamming.

AOL has apparently played a key role in lobbying for those laws, since its headquarters is in Virginia and its Compuserve unit is based in Ohio.

AOL is also the company that sued neo-Nazi chess expert-turned-spammer Davis Wolfgang Hawke, the central figure of Spam Kings, last March. That case is still pending. (A photo of Hawke, who plays chess under the pseudonym Walter Smith, is here.

Side note: tt seems that many (if not all) of the ISPs I've done work in host spammers.

You have any stats on just how many ISPs here in the U.S. provide haven for these guys? Just the other week I called the tech desk of one ISP to complain about some spammers. The guy knew about the spammers, but said that they paid them too much money for them to ever really do anything about it.

Until spam becomes a non viable cost wise it will be a problem. AOL and all the other big ISP's loved spam a while back because most folks were on per minute charges. So the more spam the longer they stayed online. Now that eveything is flat rate and it cost the ISP to support the higher bandwidth. They now care .
Also many spammer are victims themselves . Folks buy $99 packages like "how to make money on the internet" The profit for the company that sell this crap is in the 99.00
So now some sucker loads up a piece of software pays a subscription fee to spam delivery company. And off they go wating for that .001 % of umpteen gadzillion email sent that reply.
And yes people do respond to spam, not many but enough to paint a picture for the marketing folks.

My fear of legislation is these are the folks that will get hammered not the scum selling the scam..

Rog asked: You have any stats on just how many ISPs here in the U.S. provide haven for these guys?

According to Spamhaus (scroll down to the bottom of the home page), six of the top 10 most "spam friendly" ISPs are based in the US. MCI has been at the top of the Spamhaus list for ages.

The topic of "pink contracts" -- deals made between ISPs and spammers -- is covered in chapter 4 of Spam Kings. I uploaded a copy of such a contract from 2000 involving AT&T here.

Brian, I ordered a copy of your book, it arrived a couple of days ago. I have only read about the first 20 or so pages but it's a very entertaining read so far and when I've finished it maybe I'll post another comment. Well done, keep it up.

Here's a comment about spam, spammers and spammees generally (not specifically about the book) which falls into the general category "weird stuff". I was fairly heavily into spam investigating and spammer-chasing for a couple of years, and in the course of that I was hit by a "joe job" from a spammer, who sent my real name, address and phone number out on millions of pornographic e-mails. I then got deluged by phone calls and e-mails from around 60,000 mentally deluded Internet users asking me to take them off my mailing list. So far, so normal.

But here's the weird thing: the e-mails from the spammees kept arriving for 12 months after the attack, even though the attack itself was a one-off and only lasted a few hours. Which means either there is a black hole in the Internet into which e-mails disappear and then reappear months later, or some people save their spam for up to 12 months and then reply to all of it in one go saying "please take me off this mailing list, please take me off this mailing list, please take me off this mailing list".

Weird, huh? Anyone got any other suggestions?