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Interview With a Spammer

Posted by michael on from the need-a-wooden-stake dept.

Shipud writes "The NYTimes interviewed Richard Colbert, under the title of 'Confessions of a SPAM King'. Richard talks about one-time credit cards, WiFi, 'good' vs. 'bad' spam and more."

2 of 429 comments (clear)

  1. I've gotta hand it to this guy... by rwven · · Score: 5, Interesting

    LOL, i got a few good laughs out of his story. one of my favorite parts:

    '"I was thrown off more BellSouth accounts than half the state of Florida,'' Colbert says. His name was known, and he was a marked and wanted man. But he found a way around the heat. ''Do you remember when American Express came out with temporary credit cards?'' he recalls happily. ''You could go to the 7-11 convenience store and buy a $25 credit card -- sort of like you buy a $25 phone card, only it was good for just $25 worth of credit."

    Armed with a dozen of these cards, Colbert would go to the BellSouth Web site and create numerous e-mail accounts from which to send spam, each account with a fictitious name and address. Since the credit card couldn't be connected to him in any way, he could spam away until BellSouth finally got around to canceling that particular account. ''They were great, totally untraceable,'' he says of the credit cards. ''They don't sell them anymore. I think it's because of me.'' '

    pretty smart feller ;)

  2. Re:Why I love the times by 1u3hr · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Note at the end of the article:
    He points under his desk to a recent arrival, a second hard drive, precisely what he would need to begin a new network.

    ''It's a Dell Pentium 233,'' he says. ''I got it for $15, plus $23.95 shipping.''

    The reporter seems unable to distinguish between a "hard drive" and an entire computer; one wonders if his grasp of other details is as weak.