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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."
WTF is HIS email address???
Voice your support for the Death Penalty for spamers!
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
It's bad enough that they're spamming me, but then they lie about me signing up for their list. I didn't sign up, I know I didn't sign up, they know I know I didn't sigh up, so why bother?
This guy must be Andy Richter's brother - the guy who wrote the MyDoom virus!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Just yesterday, Microsoft was devising a plan to invoice spammers, now they are suing a spammer. Who needs the operating system business when you got hotmail!
9000 spam emails doesn't sound like that much. An acquaintance of mine is the developer of si20 and there's more spam than 9000 in a measly half a day of operations.
Is this merely a symbolic legal pursuit? Or is this considered a lot of spam by the powers that be?
He'll be about an eight inch tall, squashed under my shoe if I ever meet him.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
The policy from the guy's spam business site:
It prohibits:
"Unsolicited promotions, advertising or solicitations (commonly referred to as "spam"), including, without limitation, commercial advertising and informational announcements, except to those who have explicitly requested such e-mails."
Hmmmm.....
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
By any chance, does that article mention anything that he's fatally allergic to, say, something that could be purchased in bulk from a supermarket?
Just wondering.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
He's a spammer! Burn him!
Oh wait, he's spamming Microsoft Hotmail accounts? Oh hey man welcome back to the community!
Spamhaus.org rates him as the nation's (world's?) #4 spammer.
-- Will program for bandwidth
You see this in business news all the time. Brand X is the fastest growing company blah blah. Well, yeah. It's easy to see big growth numbers when you have three employees.
--- Ban humanity.
I am amazed that you can run an entire business of sending out emails that no one reads. I understand tha overhead = negligable thing, but still...How can he afford the trained monkies to write these things.
I am surprised that mass emailing is still profitable in America, with its restrictive new laws against spam. From India, cheaper connection costs and abundant IT expertise, in addition to laws which allow complete freedom of email, would seem to make India the much better choice for mass emailing business. How long till competition puts Mr. Richter out of business?
...that you'll die sooner or later, and then you won't get any more spam.
Unless of course there's life after death, in which case you'll probably get spamned for all eternity.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Rule #1: Spammers lie.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Is it possible to "SPAM back" someone by the means of /. effect?
/.-ers sending angry mail to some sites/accounts each day ...
Imagine a couple hundred thousand
One thing though is to somehow avoid showing your own address in order not to get into SPAMmers databases.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
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.
"OptInRealBig sends out between 50 million and 250 million e-mails a day, generating close to $2 million a month in revenues."
And people wonder why spammers do what they do. There are $2m worth of idiots connected to the internet.
Woohoo! Go Microsoft!
I hope you win this one.
chown -R us.
$2mil/month? Riiiight. Someone should let the IRS know, as I highly suspect that they've not heard anything about this $2mil/month revenue.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
For all his success, why doesn't he sport a William Shatner(tm) Rug on that shiny dome?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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."
Says asshat: What people don't understand is that the Internet isn't free.
GOD I FUCKING HATE THESE PEOPLE!
Since when does this dickhead own the Internet? Since when is it "not free" as in "you owe me money"?
ARGH! I not only support the death penalty for these asshats, I think they need to deport this guy's goddamn family to central Cambodia.
The absolute contempt that these people have for all other living beings outside their small inner circles is so mind-numbingly infuriating that I can't even come up with a suitable rant against this guy. The absolute level of FURY that these moronic losers can invoke through their childish, imbecilic, self-centered "give it all to me" outlooks on life could never BEGIN to compare to the narcissism displayed by everyone in Hollywood COMBINED. NEVER HAVE I SO DESIRED TO POP SOMEONE'S HEAD LIKE AN OVERINFLATED BALLOON!
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
But according to him he's raking in the big bucks! He used to be fat, but now he's 240lbs! Hey, I wonder if he has a large penis now as well?
Point is, the article failed to mention the fact that he is still stealing resources from other ISP machines. While he claims that the Internet isn't free, and he's one of those good "internet marketer bulk emailers" and that all 40 million email addresses were opt-in, and that he's not one of those scummy "hard core spammers" and he honors all remove requests...
Spammers ALWAYS LIE!
He and Darl should get together sometime...
----
I know, this is probably redundant and has probably already been said... but I do hate when thieveses like this joker just keep getting away with spamming.... so the question is asked. Who is giving him the money to continue his "business" and how can we (or anyone) stop it?
Here we see a prime example of self-delusion and self-righteousness substituting for morality. Right, the Internet isn't free. But I didn't realize that I was paying Scott Richter to get online--I thought I was paying Verizon for DSL service.
It is entertaining to see how much these people hate Steve Linford though.
It's really simple folks: if what you are doing is legit, why do you have to forge your headers? Why do you have to hide behind false email addresses? If it is legit, why do you have such a hard time getting legitimate ISPs to sell you bandwidth? Figure it out.
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.
How the hell can you call spamming "online marketing". Although I'm, a techie, I have respect for skilled marketeers, analyzing markets and fitting producsts to customers.. Spammers just dump their shit indiscriminately. It's like calling the burger flipper at McDonalds a chef!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
They all have been in some sort of legal trouble.
And it usually involves extortion, scam or theft. I wish the media would concentrate more on their criminal past. Maybe then people would get a clue and not do any business with them.
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!!
How about a Slashdot Interview with this guy (or another spammer)? I think it would be really interesting to see what (civilized) questions we could ask him and what his answers would be. He says that he puts himself in front of the media so it shouldn't be too hard to get in touch with him.
How about it editors? (I tried suggesting an interview with a spammer before, but since I didn't have a name or contact information the editors didn't want to hear it. I wonder why I should do their job for them when they're the ones getting paid...)
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
The sign on the window next to the entrance of OptInRealBig's offices in Westminster leaves no room for misunderstanding. Or irony.
NO SOLICITING.
Thats right. Thanks to the spamlords its a cost-center for most firms transmitting and receiving this junk instead of a profit center.
I'd say work. And raid roach spray.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yeah, but then he'll just take some herbal vi@gra and grow back to 6'1", because everyone knows it makes pricks get bigger.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What I've always wondered is if the President gets spam, and if so, does he buy the penis enlargers (or did capturing Saddam do the trick). I'm sure the spammers would know.
.
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.
My favorite quote from the article:
"We made nothing," Richter recalls. "I thought all you had to do was put up a Web site and you'd be a millionaire. I didn't understand the Internet."
Richter, on his first attempt at online marketing.
He just summed up the entire tech bubble.
I'm guessing he doesn't get paid by the click. Companies probably come to him with mass-mailings they would like distributed. He charges his fee to distribute them. When the company realizes those mass mailings resulted in ZERO new business, they move on to another strategy. Next in line is another company who wants to do the same thing and make the same mistake. It's an industry of lies and one-time customers, me thinks.
Most people have a fatal reaction to water, taken in large enough doses.
You can buy various brands. I like San Pellorino.
I once complained to "dotregistrar.com" about one of their clients. I used their web form to file the complaint, since they do not have any operational phone numbers. An e-mail address is required, so I used "alec@dotregistrar.mydoman.com" (I have configured my mail server to allow me to create these types of addresses on-the-fly). I never heard back from them, but to date I have recieved over 100 spam to that very same address!
Their AUP does state:
There is no information about data collected as part of a complaint, so I guess I was supposed to assume that. Any other dotregistrar stories? Did I "opt-in"?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
The problem is the association of "fast-growing" with "good". Yes, cancers that are fast-growing could be considered successful, but I don't think one would call them good. They are parasitic, and aggressively self-centered, to the point of destroying the organism within which they reside...just like spammers. "Fast-growing" isn't good if by doing so you kill what you rely on - it is unsustainable and can only end badly.
Of course, this is a spammer here - he has operated in the criminal realm, taking what he did not earn and contributing nothing, kind of like a lamprey (and about as slimy). Forethought isn't a useful concept - in his mind, there will always be one more victim, one more fish to suck the life from. As long as he doesn't need to work, or create value, he's at home. If we're fortunate, that home will be a prison in NY, making license plates.
You can usually reverse-resolve a phone number through google like this.
In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.
in my Mecury Mail rule file.
That doesn't block the senders e-mail address but rather the links that spammers use. Spammers use countless IPs and countless forged e-mail addresses to send spams that all point to the same domain so it's a highly effective means to block large amounts of spam. You also can't obfuscate a link thanks to HTML standards. And since only spammers use those domains there's 0% collateral damage. Unless someone is foolish enough to buy one of the blocked domains that doesn't intend to use it for spam.
The other benefit is that a new IP is free from the ISP or from that open proxy. Domains cost money. By filtering out those domains I've basically cost spammers a thousand bucks or so because all those domains are now useless to advertise to my e-mail accounts. The more domains they buy to try to spam me with the more money they waste.
I also have a simple catch-all written in VB to bait spam with on my home connection which saves me money on bandwidth since I can preemptively filter domains on my real server.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Oh just for fun, one of Richter's outfits is CPAempire. Check out the parody site at SPAMempire. ;)
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
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
I am now getting somewhere in the area of 40,000 spams a day to one of my servers. This system handles e-commerce for a number of small and medium-sized companies. The volume of junk e-mail has gotten so out of hand that it's bogging down my mail processes sending/receiving clients order acknowledgements and critical communication.
More than 80% of the mail my system handles is totally unsolicited. In fact, a substantive portion of it is random names @ random domains - there's no way it was ever solicited or welcome!
Now I have to build an entirely new server because F'ing assholes like this guy waste my resources and I have to handle his shit or else I'll lose my legitimate business. To say I'm furious is an understatement to the Nth degree. Any money this asshole makes is at the expense of thousands of ISPs who have to spend money and time on bandwidth and system resources. THIS GUY NEEDS TO BE IN JAIL!!!
One of the (non-computer) engineering types on my mailing list sent this in:
SPAM as an energy source? Somebody hasn't thought this one out - Spam takes some amount of energy to create, so the reaction is basically endothermic. But, on the receiving end, we all know that it frequently takes considerable time and energy (expressable as watts) to get rid of it. So, at that point, it is again endothermic. So, this is following the rules of thermo, there is an unavoidable energy loss in the process. If we want to quantify the power input of a PC, divided by the amount of spam generated per unit time, we could get the energy input (input of energy in terms of creativity and potential information is taken as approaching zero). And on the output end, while it may cause increase in blood pressure and temperature, at best it is a catalyst, contributing nothing to the reaction.
Conclusion, spam is adding to the entropy of the universe - WE HAVE FOUND ANOTHER SOURCE OF GLOBAL WARMING!
In fact, the death penalty should be modified for spammers to make sure it's slow and painful. A literal death by a thousand needle pricks might be very appropriate to the crime. Just pinch them once for every spam they sent.
...and I'm also sure that's why you're at +5, I'd like to hear your opinion on how someone raping, torturing and finally killing a child should be punished. Or Osama Bin Laden for that matter. Because then you either have some really morbid ideas, or you believe that sending a bunch of 0s and 1s over an Internet connection is the worst crime a human can commit.
A single spammer would be a slight annoyance. A million spammers is a disaster. But let's take another of Slashdot's favorite subjects, mp3 trading. A single mp3 pirate would be a slight annoyance. A million pirates is a disaster. By the same logic that lets you judge spammers by the total damage caused by spam, the RIAA should also be allowed to judge pirates by the total damage caused by piracy. Wouldn't surprise me if they went for the death penalty too.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
No, because as has been documented (including this FA) only a small number of Americans are responsible for most of the spam. With file trading, there are millions of us^H^H them, so dividing the damage by the number of perps does not lead to death penalties in this case.
Kjella, those 1's and 0's are only as good or bad as they're used for. E.g., posting pics of child rape is also just 1's and 0's, but somehow that doesn't make it as harmless as hosting a human rights site.
;)
E.g., if you're into splitting things into bits and then debating those bits, a landmine is just nitrogen, oxygen, iron, carbon, and some other equally harmless elements. Nothing you wouldn't find in soil naturally, you know. So, by that kind of warped logic, surely noone should be punished for placing a few of them on a playground. Right?
E.g., a bullet is only lead and a copper jacket. You probably get the analogy with "it's only 1's and 0's" by now.
Basically what I'm saying is: it's safe to get off that high horse now
It's not the 1's and 0's we're debating, it's the way they're used.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Instead of suing the customers, sue the guys who PAY the spammers to spam. Very few of these spamemrs are selling their own products...they're usually guns-for-hire for some website that wants to promote its product or service. So arrest the bastards.
It's against the law to hire someone to conduct an illegal activity in yout stead, you're generally charged with the same crime that person commits. (i.e. hiring a hitman gets you a nice fat murder trial) So...since states are making spamming illegal, by that logic, hiring a spammer is also illegal. This also opens up foreign website owners who employ spammers to extradition from friendly countries.
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