May 19 2008
Spammer: Scott Richter
First post in my Who are the Biggest Spammers series:
First person I am going to feature is Scott Richter, I am starting with him because of Myspace pending case (filed in 2007) against him for allegedly stealing passwords to spam MySpace users (Update: MySpace won the case).
Scott Richter is famous enough to warrant a largish article in Wikipedia.
Mr. Richter is the owner and CEO of Media Breakaway, formerly known as OptInRealBig.com LLC (facing a $50 million judgment in Washington state from the Microsoft case, in March 2005, OptInRealBig.com filed for bankruptcy protection).
He was once listed in the Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) top 200 spammers, but his inclusion in the list was deleted in 2005, when Spamhaus acknowledged that Richter and his company had not received any complaints for over a year.
His company once sent some 100 million emails a day. One of the most famous emails was the offer of most-wanted Iraqi playing cards in 2003; Richter claims to have sold 40,000 decks before they were even printed.
Richter attempted to start up a “Spam King” clothing line before Hormel (the company who holds the original edible SPAM trademarks) put an end to his trademark-infringing idea.
There is talk that Scott Richter has now moved on to schemes to promote ringtones through dubious means, often to unwilling buyers, such as through websites claiming to offer free ringtones, but which then actually charge the customer with a monthly subscription.
To be fair, you can see some conversation with him about this view on spamming here:
http://www.pcworld.com/
You can also view this funny video which does take some punches on YouTube
