Free Spam Kings by Brian S McWilliams Page A

him was not to allow small setbacks to thwart his grand strategy.
     Although his mother was furious to learn of the teacher's reaction to his genealogy report,
     Hawke let the incident slide by. But eight years later, he quietly made the trip down to the
     Dedham courthouse to change his name. And neither parent opposed the move.
    Hawke thumbed through the Greenville/Spartanburg Yellow Pages. He was looking for the
     section on Internet services. After a few phone calls, he arranged for a new dial-up account
     with a company in Anderson called Carolina Online. He signed onto Carol.net and began
     piecing together his next Venture Alpha offering.
    This time, he would market something called Million Dollar Publishing Company in a
     Box. He had got the idea a few weeks back from a piece of junk email that arrived
     in his Yahoo! in-box. The message, apparently sent by a company in western Massachusetts,
     advertised a CD-ROM with advice on how to start a home-based business selling "information
     through the mail." For ninety-nine dollars, the author was willing to part with full reprint
     rights to hundreds of reports on topics ranging from how to win a sweepstakes contest to how
     to become a TV or movie star.
    Hawke recognized the offer for the scam it was. Like the Web Manual, the only people
     likely to buy the Publishing Company in a Box were other spammers. It wasn't quite a pyramid
     scheme, but it relied on some of the same twisted logic. Hawke chuckled at one especially
     clever part of the ad:
    I am sending this ad to 10,000 other people...and I will only allow 50 kits to
     be sold. It wouldn't make much sense if I sold this kit to 1,000 or 2,000 people...The
     market would be saturated with these same manuals...and I don't want to do that. To make
     sure that the people in this offer get the same results I have...ONLY 50 people can have
     it for $99.00!
    The author even promised to return, uncashed, any checks he received after selling his
     quota of fifty kits. Hawke realized he would be ecstatic if he made $5,000 from his
     hundred-dollar investment. Then again, if hundreds of orders rolled in, who would know
     besides him? Hawke purchased the CD-ROM, determined this time to make some serious money
     before spam haters got in his way.
    When the CD arrived in the mail, Hawke took it to a computer store in Spartanburg that
     charged five dollars per CD to burn two dozen copies for him. Since Interspeed had shut down
     his WebManual2000.com site for violating its terms of service, Hawke had to come up with a
     temporary work-around until he could find a new host for the domain. He uploaded a copy of
     the old site's files, slightly modified for his new venture, from his PC to a home page he
     had created at Angelfire.com.
    A free, ad-supported home page provider catering to consumers, Boston-based Angelfire
     had two big drawbacks. It didn't allow members to advertise their home pages using spam or
     to run programs for processing online orders. To fill the latter gap, Hawke signed up at
     CartManager.net for a fourteen-day demonstration. The Utah-based electronic shopping cart
     service would enable him to seamlessly submit orders from his Angelfire site to his account
     at CartManager.
    After creating a new email account for the project, [email protected] , Hawke worked on his ad copy. He used the original
     message almost verbatim, with necessary changes to the ordering information. Hawke also
     modified a section at the bottom of the ad that instructed recipients on how they could opt
     out of future mailings. In hopes of mollifying spam haters, Hawke whipped up this version
     instead:
    We are STRICTLY OPPOSED to spam! You are receiving this email because you
     have either signed up for one of our services or you have authorized your email address
     to be given out by filling out an "opt-in" form when signing up for any type of free
     service. If you wish to be removed from this email list, please send a