Spam Kings (25 page)

Vale's October 2003 sentencing date would come and go. As the result of numerous
postponements, Vale would remain behind bars awaiting sentencing for nearly twelve months.
It wasn't until June 2004 that he would learn his fate.

In May 2003, millions of Internet users got a refreshing break from the run-of-the-mill
spam that routinely invaded their email in-boxes. Instead of hawking mortgages,
penis-enlargement pills, or weight-loss products, an email arrived that seemed straight out
of a science-fiction novel.
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The message offered $5,000 to any vendor capable of promptly delivering a collection of
far-fetched gadgets for conducting time travel, including an "Acme 5X24 series time
transducing capacitor
with built-in temporal displacement" and an "AMD Dimensional Warp
Generator
module containing the GRC79 induction motor."

Dave Hill, a software programmer in Iowa, normally deleted a couple dozen junk emails
every day with hardly a glance. But when he received the time-travel solicitation, he hit
the reply button instead. Hill sent the spammer a message saying he could get him what he
wanted. With a little deft photo-editing, Hill created a fake online store with all the
sci-fi items sought by the would-be time-traveler. In July, Hill even shipped an old
hard-drive motor disguised as a "warp generator" to a Massachusetts address provided by the
spammer, who said his name was Bob White.

When White gratefully acknowledged receipt of the parts a few days later and earnestly
asked for help obtaining others, Hill decided to end the stunt. He had expected White to
tell him that it was all a joke. But instead White seemed totally serious about his quest
for time travel and in need of psychological help.

Hill was not the first Internet user to be drawn into the strange world of the
mysterious man some refer to as the time-travel spammer
. Since 2001, people have posed as aliens, time-travel equipment vendors, and
intergalactic policemen—anything to feed the imagination of the strange spam's sender. The
odd interplay began in November 2001, when someone calling himself Robby sent millions of
emails with the subject line, "Time Travelers PLEASE HELP."

The three-page, single-spaced message began, "Here is a brief description of my life,"
and went on to describe how the author had been drugged and poisoned as a child by Denise, a
woman his divorced father had dated.

"I and also my Mom made my dad break up with her...My dad never believed me about her or
what she did, or the side effects I had from her poisonings. I am 21 now, and since then my
life has been obviously completely tampered with. I believe she is the link," he wrote.
Robby's message then described how, one morning after taking a shower, he noticed UFOs in
the sky and suddenly saw a flash of white light.

"It seemed as if I rotated slightly with this tremendous force on my body and everything
went blank for a second. The air was warm and dry for that quick second. I heard this click
which sounded like a camera. And then it was over," he wrote. When Robby went to wake up his
mother and tell her what had happened, she pointed out that it was 12:30 in the morning, and
he should go back to bed.

"This was all real, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that time travel is possible
for me. I believe it happened as a sign that I am meant for time travel as an only option to
correct what has been done to my life," wrote Robby. He concluded his message with an appeal
to readers.

"I believe that God is leading me to a time traveler who can help me with the type of
time travel needed. Please I am dying! The sooner we can get started the better," he
wrote.

Some Internet users speculated on discussion lists that Robby was actually a sci-fi
author in search of material. Others suggested the time-travel messages were just a cunning
way for spammers to harvest working email addresses. The more common assumption was that the
unidentified author of the emails was just out for fun. To play along, a few pranksters even
created fake eBay auctions in response to the messages.

But one person who received Robby's message found something haunting about the strange
cry for help. Brendan Milburn, a member of the New York jazz-rock trio GrooveLily, penned a
tune about it. "Rewind" was released on the band's 2003 album,
Are We There
Yet
. It goes like this:

It wasn't until August of 2003 that fans of the time-travel spams learned they were
actually the work of a 22-year-old Woburn, Massachusetts, man named James R. Todino.

"Robby," it turned out, was dead serious about his desire to rewind time. He lived at
home with his mother, who was divorced from his father, an electrician living in nearby
Billerica. Robby's psychological problems—he had been diagnosed with dissociative disorder
and mild schizophrenia—prevented him from holding down most jobs, unless they involved
working at home on the computer.

His parents had long ago given up trying to argue with Robby about time travel. But they
worried that he wasn't very street-smart and was easily manipulated. Some people had tried
to take advantage of his gullibility and had sold him phony equipment. Others strung him
along with long telephone calls and emails that only exacerbated his torment.

But although Todino's time-travel messages made him appear fragile and unstable, he was
a remarkably competent and hardheaded spammer. Years before his first time-travel emails,
Todino had been sending out garden-variety spams for everything from "free" government
grants to "detective" software. Todino had discovered the junk email business just prior to
graduating from Shawsheen Valley Technical High School in 1999, where he studied welding and
culinary arts. In March 1999, he mass-emailed a "chain mail" scam that attempted to trick
naïve recipients into sending him five dollars. Later that year, Todino registered a handful
of web sites under the company name RT Marketing and began spamming for a variety of
products.

By November 2000, Todino was on Shiksaa's radar. After his web sites were repeatedly
shut down for spamming, he broadcast some emails searching for someone to sell him a "bulk
friendly" T1 line. Posing as a potential supplier, Shiksaa contacted him over AOL Instant
Messenger.

"You need a T1?" she asked.

"Yes."

"OK, how much can you pay? What is your company? I know a guy, but he'll want to know
what you want it for," she said.

"My company is RT Marketing...I am willing to pay triple as much as a regular T1
connection if you can keep me up," said Todino.

"I don't understand. What do you mean?"

"Well, basically, I will not be mailing through my T1 connection. I just need the T1 to
make my website accessible to the Internet. It will generate complaints, but they will not
violate your terms of service," he explained.

Todino gave Shiksaa his real name and phone number, after which she said her friend
"Ronnie" would be in touch.

Less than a year later, in August 2001, officials from the Massachusetts attorney
general's office were knocking on Todino's door. In the state's first legal action against a
spammer, Todino and his company RT Marketing were accused of sending misleading and
deceptive ads. Regulators pointed out that Todino's "grant program" was just a list of grant
organizations, and the "detective" software was just a list of informational web sites found
on the Internet. The state fined Todino $5,000 and convinced him to sign an "assurance of
discontinuance" deal, under which he agreed to stop sending fraudulent bulk emails.

But Todino hardly seemed intimidated by the Massachusetts order. Within weeks, he was
spamming again under a new company name, PK Marketing
, and using more sophisticated techniques to conceal his identity.

Shortly thereafter, Todino's first wave of time-travel spam hit the Internet. It was as
if his run-in with the government had somehow triggered the strange quest. Over time, his
messages became increasingly specific about the technology he needed to rewind his life. In
February 2002, he sent a flurry of anonymous messages appealing to anyone who was a "time
traveler or alien disguised as human." The spams stated that his life had been "severely
tampered with" and he needed "temporal reversion" to correct it.

"If you can help me, I will pay for your teleport or trip down here, along with hotel
stay, food and all expenses. I will pay top dollar for the equipment. Proof must be
provided," stated the messages.

Todino accumulated plenty of evidence that the equipment he needed was out there
somewhere. Someone sent him a twenty-five-page manual entitled "Dimensional Warp Generator
User's Manual," which was apparently created by cutting and pasting material from
computer-hardware documentation. Someone else provided a couple automotive wiring diagrams
that had been doctored so that they appeared to be time-travel equipment schematics. Others
emailed Todino photos of souped up digital watches, apparently meant to look like portable
time machines.

Not everyone wanted to help Todino acquire the technology he desired. In August 2002, he
got an email, sent from a Hotmail account, with the subject line "Time Travel." It notified
Todino that the author was responsible for monitoring "electronic communications." The email
warned him to "stop all forms of communication on this topic" and said Todino would be
arrested by an agent and returned after receiving a "cranosistanic reversal." Todino was
informed to delete the email after reading it, or else be in violation of "Dimensional
Displacement Diversion Act
of section 44563b-232 Article 40498.442."

To Todino, the emails, phone calls, and documents were further proof that members of a
conspiracy, which he referred to as the Renns, were trying to follow his every move and
control his life, including his use of the Internet. The information made him more
determined than ever to raise the money he'd need to finance his trip back in time.

PK Marketing's commercial spamming reached a peak in late spring of 2003, when Todino
broadcast millions of messages advertising "free cash grants" at his site
GrantGiveAwayProgram.com. It was around this time that Todino met Davis Hawke (whom he knew
as Dave Bridger) at the BulkersClub.com forum.

At the time, Hawke was looking to make some extra money subletting some of the web
hosting he had paid for in South America. In a note at the spammer site, "Dave Bridger"
advertised "extremely solid" web hosting and boasted that he'd experienced "about 24 hours
of downtime in the last three weeks, and we've been up for about five months with no
problems." Bridger said he used "DNS floating and IP rotation via proxies" to completely
hide the origin of a server, "so it NEVER gets blacklisted or shut down." The price for
Bridger's hosting service was $150 for a trial week and $250 per week after that.

After Todino sent him $150 by PayPal, Bridger set up PK Marketing with access to one of
Amazing Internet's domains, Pharycon.com. Todino then modified his ads for "free government
grants" to list the domain. Later, Hawke also gave him access to Zakarish.com, a site that
Hawke also rented out to some spammers who were selling access to pornographic web
cams.

As part of his new effort to hide his identity, Todino often listed other people's email
addresses in the "From" line of his spams. In the middle of May 2003, he sent out millions
of ads with a forged return address belonging to a web site with information about Cairo,
Egypt. When Philippe Simard, one of the operators of the site, egy.com, began receiving
bounce notices and complaints, he fought back by convincing PK Marketing's credit card
processor to shut down its account.

Simard also put up a page at the site explaining that egy.com was not responsible for
the spams. The page included a copy of the domain registration for pharycon.com, leading
many people to assume that Hawke and Bournival were responsible for the forged messages.
Unfortunately for Dr. Fatburn
, it was one of the registrations in which Hawke had also put Alan Moore's name,
so some of the heat was directed his way as well.

All the commotion over the Joe-job
made it impossible for Todino to hide his secret any longer. In August 2003,
inquisitive Internet users and reporters fingered the longtime spammer as the source of the
time-travel emails.
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In response, Spamhaus added Todino to the Rokso list, and his record on Spews
was updated with the new information.

Several weeks later, an avalanche of what appeared to be retaliatory messages began
hitting three anti-spam web sites that had spotlighted Todino as the author of the
time-travel spams. Someone had forged the sites' domains as the return addresses on a recent
flurry of junk emails advertising anti-spam software. As a result, the innocent sites were
inundated with hundreds of thousands of error messages and complaints about the spam.

The messages, which bore subject lines such as "Stop Spam in Its Tracks" and "Say
Goodbye to Junk Email," advertised Quickeasysolution.com as the source of an anti-spam
software program.

Among the targets of the Joe-job attack was Interesting-People.org, the home of a
mailing list moderated by Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor David
Farber. The site was slammed with hundreds of thousands of bounce messages from all over the
Internet. Similarly, Inertramblings.com, a blog run by Sean Sosik-Hamor, received over
350,000 of the error messages. The operator of Lindqvist.com, Niklas Lindqvist, who was the
third victim, reported receiving 30,000 such messages in six hours.