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Spammer Profile: Scott Richter
prostoalex writes "Westword.com published an article on Scott Richter, the owner of what is supposedly the nation's fastest-growing online marketing company, which mostly specialized in sending out those unsolicited electronic mail messages. Richter is the guy currently being sued by New York Attorney General and Microsoft Corporation for sending out nearly 9000 e-mails only to Hotmail accounts."
Spamhaus.org rates him as the nation's (world's?) #4 spammer.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Sadly, all we are doing is giving this guy free advertising. Even bas publicity is good publicity. On a different note, a lot of these guys are not ashamed of what they do. I met one once at an Open Source conference and when you ask him what he does he very plainly states "I'm a spammer". The guy was a total pariah.
According the Contact Us page, it's info@optinbig.com.
Hey Andy! you take requests? http://www.optinbig.com/ unkay?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I get about 30 messages a day from this guy's "Allied Marketing Promotions Inc." on my Yahoo account. They usually arrive in chunks of 5-10 messages at a time, all peddling different "products", mostly the same spam fare such as mortgages and pills of one sort or another. It started about two weeks ago but Yahoo's spam filter still hasn't caught on...
Definitely someone with an aluminum bat deficiency.
"Ford," he said, "you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
From a PDF of the lawsuit:
OptInRealBig, LLC is a limited liability corporation, with its principal place of business at 1333 W 120th Ave, Suite 101 Westminster, CO 80234.
Wonder if he is getting enough mail at is office? I would expect that a few additional catalogs would do alot to spruce up the place.
Definition
Your misconception is that the new federal law (which replaces all state laws, some of which had real teeth to them) is restrictive. The irony in the law being named CANSPAM, and it really is named CANSPAM, is not to be understated here. The law says that UCE must be labeled as such, but leaves it up to the sender to define how it is labeled.
Rule 1: Spammers lie Take a look at a few of his quotes here
The article about him from the BBC is what scares me. "We are very excited [about the new CAN-SPAM law]," said Scott Richter, the president of OptInRealBig, an e-mail marketing firm in Westminster, Colo. "All of our clients had been worried about the California law. In the last two hours we have been booking a lot of orders for January."
This guy is the kind of guy that would piss in your pool. Now that he's got the internet, he gets to piss on millions of people at a time.
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
What they could mean is 9,000 different peices of spam. Like 1 million that is selling Vi@agra and a half a million selling get rich quick scepems, ect. Just an idea.
On a related note, I've noticed the spam filters of my yahoo account has consistantly failed in recent days to block stuff from one or two specific spamers. I think we're beginning to see the wide-spread deployment of those new ani-filtering techniques some have talked about. These annoying idiots are clogging up my mailbox to the point where I need to empty it out myself once or twice a day such that legitimate mail don't get bounced back.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
I don't know his email address, but his PHONE NUMBER is
(303) 464-8164
N'joy!!
ps- Don't forget to ask if his penis is larger!!
You added a few zeros
$12,500, but the same principle still applies - "free" money is still free money
And Richter is making money by mailing for others as much (or more than) anything he owns. If nobody buys, you still make money on what you charged the customer to send 'em out.
I have the international phone number for them right here, I'm in the UK and I just wasted 5 seconds of thier time going "um" and apologising. Perhaps someone with a stronger constitution can take out +1 303 464 8164
Official source for this number, from the optinbig website.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
A lot of spammers are based in unfriendly countries and are very difficult to sue.
Not true. The vast majority of spammers are based in the US.
If you had RTFA, you would realize that the 9000 were collected by Hotmail's "spam traps", created for the sole purpose of collecting spam. Further, these 9000 were all part of the same campaign with fraudulent headers. The 9000 represent only a fraction of e-mail sent to Hotmail addresses as part of the campaign, but since the spam trap addresses could never have legitimately opted in, they are the smoking gun in the lawsuit against 'Snotty'.
---- Just another spud server.
Read the article. Case in point was Iraq trading cards. He sent out 15 million emails, received 40,000 purchases. That's 1:375. Better than I would have thought. That's also $5.06 profit per transaction, which means he grossed $202,400, and I'll bet his net take wasn't much lower than the gross (what's the overhead for a spammer? Virtually nil, I would imagine.)
"Teachers leave us kids alone
Article Text:
From westword.com
Originally published by Westword Jan 29, 2004
(C)2004 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Mr. Spam Man
Microsoft wants to shut him down. New York's attorney general wants to see him in court. But Scott Richter keeps thinking big.
BY ALAN PRENDERGAST
John Johnston
Scott Richter
Stephen Chernin/Getty Images
Talking trash: Microsoft attorney Brad Smith (left) watches as New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer vows to delete Scott Richter's profits.
Source: Brightmail Logistics and Operations Center
FWD: SCOTT, DON'T SUFFER BETWEEN PAYCHECKS! THINK BIG!
In Scott Richter's world, size matters.
Richter knows that Americans like things big. Bigger penis, bigger breasts. Big savings. Big chance to win big. Think big about the bigness people crave, and big profits could be yours.
Richter is a big fellow himself, 240 pounds or so packed on a 6' 1" frame. He used to be bigger, before he got into big-time weight loss. But these days, it's his business that'sreally big. His e-mail marketing company, OptInRealBig, controls a host of like-minded domain names, including SaveRealBig, RealBigCash, RealGreatGifts, RealBigHosting andLesbiansSizzle.com (lesbians, God knows, are big). At 32, Richter's already spent nearly two decades chasing the Next Big Thing -- and finding it, the past few years, in cyberspace.
Last April, as American forces marched into Baghdad, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks showed a group of reporters a mock-up of playing cards featuring the faces of Iraqi leaders sought for questioning. Right away, Richter knew this was going to be big, big, big.
The Pentagon had developed the cards as an intelligence tool, to be distributed to the troops. Richter saw them as the war souvenir the public had been waiting for. Within hours, his company was shooting out e-mails advertising the cards for sale -- more than 15 million e-mails, in fact. Richter moved 40,000 decks of the cards in a week, buying them for 89 cents each and selling them for $5.95. Yet at the time he started the blitz, he didn't have a single deck in stock. Nobody did.
"We sold them before we ever owned them," he recalls. "Wal-Mart would've taken three weeks to get them in. We knew we could find them, so we went to work."
Richter tells the story while bottle-feeding one of his five-month-old twin sons in the kitchen of his Westminster home. It's a clean, spacious, well-lit place, with a portrait of Marilyn Monroe in the foyer, three Rhodesian Ridgebacks cavorting on the back deck, and hockey trophies and a pair of giant flat-screen monitors towering over the desk in the den. It's the kind of house you'd expect a young, sober, hard-driving entrepreneur to inhabit with his young, budding family. It's also totally at odds with Richter's reputation among his enemies on the Internet, who regard him as one of the most notorious and "morally challenged" spammers in the world.
If you have an e-mail account and have ever been careless about the kind of information you scatter about while surfing the Web, chances are good that you've received mail from Richter. OptInRealBig boasts of having a list of 45 million e-mail addresses at its disposal, many with additional demographic or consumer-preference information. The company also e-mails to millions of other addresses provided by clients, who use Richter's services to hawk everything from diet pills and porn sites to vacation packages and Christmas toys. OptInRealBig sends out between 50 million and 250 million e-mails a day, generating close to $2 million a month in revenues.
According to the Spamhaus Project, a British-based organization dedicated to combating the expanding swamp of unsolicited e-mail, Richter's operation ranks as the third-largest source of spam on the Internet. "OptInRealBig.com and Richter's many aliases are 'block-on-sight' domains for most of the Internet's mail systems," states the group's profile of Richter. "Due to his
Following the daily camera link on that search yields an article that claims Mr. Richter himself answered this number: (303) 550-9828
u mnists/ article/0,1713,BDC_2490_2615380,00.html
(article is at this URL):
http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/opinion_col