Internet Defense Technology

Continuation of Who are the Biggest Spammers series:

Next up is Walter Rines (common typo Walter Rimes) because of the recent case he lost again Myspace, to the sum of $230 million.

MySpace sued him and Sanford Wallace (long time partners) for having sent as many as 30 million spam messages per day during a period of time in the 1990s. They spammed MySpace by creating their own accounts and stealing the passwords of others. They then went on to mass message users an estimated 735,925 times.

This isn’t the first time Walter Rines has been part of a lawsuit. Another big suit was filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against him and his company, Odysseus Marketing, in October of 2005 tied to spyware (it was settled in 2006). In 2008 he had trouble with FTC again due to them asking the judge in the spyware case to find Wallace and Rines in contempt for violating their 2006 agreement.

These two might want to part company and find new healthier endevours, they keep getting into trouble.

In 1998 Wallace and Rines attempted to launch a company that would provide users with low-cost Internet service in exchange for agreeing to receive spam. But Wallace and Rines’ Spambone idea died when their company, GTMI, couldn’t find a big networking firm willing to provide bandwidth. With a flourish, Wallace announced his retirement from spamming in 1998.

Walter Rines said a disclaimer at Kazanon.com, the main site where he was distributing his Trojan horse program, acknowledged that “adware” was being installed on users’ computers. He admitted that he was operating in a legal “grey area.”

Not worthy of a Wikipedia article yet (unlike his partner Sanford Wallace, who I will be doing next) but here are some links:
Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines in trouble with FTC again
MySpace wins $230 million anti-spam judgment

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

The “CAN-Spam” Act of 2003 (dubbed the “Yes, You Can Spam” Act by some) was supposed to reduce spam.

The arrest of Robert Alan Soloway in May 2007, a 27-year-old man described as one of the world’s most prolific spammers and called by some the “King of Spam”, had the federal authorities predicting that computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.

However we have been seeing an increase (below numbers from Wikipedia):
2005 - (June) 30 billion per day
2006 - (June) 55 billion per day
2007 - (February) 90 billion per day
2007 - (June) 100 billion per day

It feels like we are just going to continue to see this increase year after year.

On the other side, the filtering technology is getting better and better so users who get set-up on a good spam filter (insert plug for our Total Mail Defense product here, LOL) can expect to not even notice this increase.

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam

Update: Well it seems there is some controversy about the exact date and years (no surprise) with articles about the 30th birthday of Spam in early May. It does seem it is around this time and certainly a lot of years.

Today (Apr 8th) is the birthday of spam, 15 years ago Joel Furr defined “spam” and after that the web phenomenon evolved.

According to Wikipedia and Brad Templeton, Furr is one of the earliest people to refer to unsolicited electronic messages as “spam“.

The term “spam” had been widely used by Monty Python fans to describe excessive torrents of verbiage on electronic chat systems remember the Vikings chanting “spam spam spam spam spam, WONDERFUL SPAM” in the legendary Python sketch.

Furr used the term in the USENET newsgroup news.admin.policy to describe an out-of-control automated robo-moderation system known as ARMM.

While he didn’t coin the phrase, he appears to have been the first to use it to describe the phenomenon as it applied to USENET newsgroups.

Makes you wonder if it would have been so bad without the name. Well, not really, but sometimes don’t you wish we could wish it away.

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam