- Richard Colbert
Richard Colbert was a prolific spammer based in Miami,
Florida , in an area known as "Spam Beach".He would obtain clients' email addresses by searching
AOL member profiles for any including phrases such as "business opportunity" or "multilevel marketing", believing them to be small-time salesmen like himself. He would then spam these individuals with offers for his service to spam on their behalf, and reply personally to anyone who responded. Having secured clients, he would send their advertisements to general recipients on lists he had purchased, charging up to US$900 for a million addresses.He was interviewed by the "
New York Times " in2003 , in which he insisted he always included legitimate "from" addresses in his messages, and honoured unsubscribe requests, believing the alternative to be detrimental to the business of online marketing. However, he also used American Express's anonymous $25temporary credit cards to set up short-lived email accounts with his local operator,BellSouth , from which he could spam freely and without risk of being traced until each address was shut down.However, despite making a profit from spamming (apparently clearing $130,000 in three months), he continued to live in a
mobile home and obtain his clothes and equipment fromeBay .He retired from spamming in 2003, and was subsequently removed from
ROKSO , the Spamhaus Project's list of prolific spammers.External links
* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C00E0D71E3AF93BA1575AC0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon= "Confessions of a Spam King"] -- the "New York Times" article
ee Also
*
List of spammers
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