It has been ten years since Sanford Wallace first burst onto the Internet. Since then he has gone offline and back online again at least twice, and repeatedly changed the city in which he does business. He stays on the move, presumably to prevent attempts at reprisals against him. The reason is that his business efforts make people angry. Wallace calls himself the original 'spam king.' Others call him 'Spamford' and much worse.

Wallace wasn't the one who originally came up with the concept of sending unwanted emails to hundreds of thousands or even millions of people daily. But he was the one who kept at it, who reveled in the acrimony that his actions attracted. He was the one who dedicated his career to the prospect that if he sent his pitch to enough people, the offer didn't matter. Some tiny percentage would respond. He sold his services to anyone who would buy, from swampland real estate scammers to nutritional supplement purveyors to sellers of sexual enhancement software and hardware.

Oppositional Personality Type

There are individuals on the loose in the world who are driven to rebel, to defy social mores in a public and belligerent manner, to seek out scenarios in which they can live out adolescent thoughts of being Black Bart or Billy the Kid, living a fantasy in which they are smarter, more courageous, more vital or simply more profitable than the blasé working stiffs around them. Doubtless the DSM-IV, (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) has a classification that covers this particular and peculiar aberration, but suggesting that Wallace is one of these is unlikely to provide much solace to the hapless computer user suffering an overwhelming avalanche of unwanted email or spyware.

Spam - the Data Type

Spam is a problem for all, but new and naïve users find it particularly vexing. Especially when a user may have done nothing more provocative than establish a MySpace account or innocently respond to an email with a polite request to be removed from a mail list, a user can be pushed to the boiling point when the volume of traffic to his inbox suddenly increases by a factor of ten, a hundred or a thousand, overwhelming file size limits and burying legitimate email under an avalanche of dross. These algae blooms of unwanted mail are Sanford Wallace's stock in trade.

The Response to the Barbarian at the Gate

There are communities of technophiles dedicated to finding and neutralizing people who use the net to victimize innocents. One such group is the circle of nerds and hackers known as 2600, a magazine published in Cambridge, MA. As long ago as 1997, 2600 hackers forced their way onto the server for Cyber Promotions, Wallace's host from which he, at the time, spewed his troublesome trash. Harvesting extensive mail and contact lists from there, they posted everything they found to a public bulletin board. Comments subsequently posted by the public urged all manner of mayhem and degradation against Wallace, his progeny, his neighbors, and his ancestors dating back to Braveheart.

Understandably, Wallace keeps his personal life as shadowy as possible. We know he was born in the United States, probably in New Jersey, in 1968. By the time he was 23 he was involved in the junk fax industry. The industry used automatic phone dialers that dialed thousands of phone numbers and assembled lists of numbers where a fax carrier signal could be detected. Then unsolicited faxes bearing advertising for fax paper or copier supplies were repeatedly sent to the untold numbers of people on those lists. It was obnoxious. In 1991 a federal law was passed making the sending of junk faxes illegal and punishable by a $500 fine for each instance.

Fortunately for Wallace, sales of personal computers had just begun to take off. About 50 million systems were in use. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee introduced the world wide web. Email had already been in use in one form or another for several years. Wallace had a new technology available to him with which he could replace junk faxes without losing the annoying place in the marketplace that he so enjoys.

Spam - The Meat Product

When Wallace began his unsavory online activities, bulk emailing didn't even have a name. Spam hardly seems to fit. Spam, a canned pork substance available on shelves since 1937, is one degree of separation removed from the email. Monty Python provided just the cultural bridge that made the dissemination of the name into a natural. A Monty Python comedy sketch culminates in a song comprised entirely of repeating a single word. Just as the word 'spam' floods the lyrics of the song, so have unwanted emails in recent years come to inundate the days of our lives. It may be argued, and it might be true, that if Sanford Wallace had not done it, someone else would have. But he did, and it has been alleged that at one point Wallace was responsible for two thirds of the junk email going through the Internet. Meanwhile, Hormel Corporation recently concluded a lawsuit to prevent use of the word 'spam' in software advertising, believing apparently that there is such a thing as bad publicity. They lost.

Thriving on Chaos

The road has not been smooth for Wallace since his start in the junk mail industry. But that is apparently the working world in which he is most comfortable. In 1997, at the peak of his career to date, he was distributing at least a million emails per day. Some estimates figure the number to be closer to 25 million per day. Also in 1997 he reserved the domain godhatesfags.com and served for a time as the technical contact for that site. He sold his services sending junk email to any who would pay, and though he claimed in interviews that he did not spam on behalf of the Internet porn industry, he admitted at the same time that he sold software and services to other firms that did.

Throughout all of this, his negative press grew. Wallace maintained that his was the way of the good and the right, that his efforts were covered by the constitutional protection of free speech, and that his methods of marketing were no different than any other advertiser making junk phone calls or placing billboards on the side of the highways. But after twenty ISPs had canceled or refused him service, he announced that he would start his own Internet backbone service that would host Internet services for spammers far and wide, in the name of free speech. Perhaps he didn't have the skills, because it didn't happen. AGIS, the backbone company he had under contract, said he had violated his terms of service and slammed the door on him.

Change of Life

Or maybe it was because he didn't have the money. In 1998, Wallace lost lawsuits pressed by ISPs Earthlink and Bigfoot, incurring judgments from the two suits exceeding $2 million. AOL and Compuserve sued him and won. Another judgment for $4 million was handed down in 2004. He said he wouldn't do it anymore. He got a divorce. He started a nightclub in New Hampshire. When that failed he moved to Las Vegas where he now does business at various clubs under the name DJ Masterweb. His potential $4 million fine was settled, resulting in a $40,000 fine to be paid by Wallace and a partner, Walt Rines.

DJ Masterweb

It is alleged that Wallace is a good disk jockey, and the earning potential for the best of them is high. But apparently he likes the income from spamming better. In 2004 the FTC filed a suit against him and his company Smartbot, for distributing spyware and for violating the 2003 US-CAN-SPAM Act. His method was to distribute spyware and then advertise software that would, for $30 and a credit card number, remove the spyware. Wallace ceased and desisted, but not for long. In January 2008 he was cited for contempt when MySpace alleged to the FTC that he and an affiliated company, Feebleminded Productions, had used custom software to create over 10,000 artificial MySpace addresses, and then used those addresses to post 400,000 advertising emails within the MySpace system and almost a million fictitious comments. The phony emails and comments directed browsers to two Las Vegas websites controlled by Wallace. Many of the phony emails also directed browsers to phony login pages that prompted the unwitting user to enter their MySpace user ID and password. Wallace argued that because the spam was contained within the MySpace system, it didn't qualify as email. The FTC didn't buy that story, and the saga goes on.

Even someone like Wallace is subject to the butterfly effect. Hundreds of imitators have followed in his footsteps. Also, primarily due to his resourcefulness and chutzpah, the Internet industry has found it useful to add a colorful new lexicon: spyware, spoofing, spamming, phishing, pagejacking and mousetrapping. And he is still under forty. We have an entire lifetime of Spamford Wallace shenanigans to look forward to.

Jim Rue does business in Orange County, California. He can be reached at jim.rue [at] gmail [dot] com