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            [#value] => <p>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 &#39;spam king.&#39; Others call him &#39;Spamford&#39; and much worse.</p>

<p>Wallace wasn&#39;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&#39;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.<br />
<br />
</p>

<p><strong>Oppositional Personality Type</strong></p>

<p>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. <br />
<strong><br />
Spam  - the Data Type</strong></p>

<p>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 <a href="/freelinking/MySpace">MySpace</a> 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&#39;s stock in trade. </p>

<p><strong>The Response to the Barbarian at the Gate</strong></p>

<p>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&#39;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.</p>

<p>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. </p>

<p>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.</p>

<p><strong>Spam - The Meat Product </strong></p>

<p>When Wallace began his unsavory online activities, bulk
emailing didn&#39;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 &#39;spam&#39; 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 &#39;spam&#39; in software advertising, believing apparently that there<em>
is</em> such a thing as bad publicity. They lost.</p>

<p><strong>Thriving on Chaos</strong></p>

<p>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. </p>

<p>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&#39;t have the skills, because it didn&#39;t happen.  AGIS, the backbone company he had under contract,
said he had violated his terms of service and slammed the door on him. </p>

<p><strong>Change of Life </strong></p>

<p>Or maybe it was because he didn&#39;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&#39;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.</p>



<p><strong>DJ Masterweb</strong></p>

<p>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 <a href="/freelinking/MySpace">MySpace</a> alleged to the FTC that he and an affiliated company,
Feebleminded Productions, had used custom software to create over 10,000
artificial <a href="/freelinking/MySpace">MySpace</a> addresses, and then used those addresses to post 400,000
advertising emails within the <a href="/freelinking/MySpace">MySpace</a> 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 <a href="/freelinking/MySpace">MySpace</a>
user ID and password. Wallace argued that because the spam was contained within
the <a href="/freelinking/MySpace">MySpace</a> system, it didn&#39;t qualify as email. The FTC didn&#39;t buy that story,
and the saga goes on.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p><em>Jim Rue does business in </em><em>Orange
  County</em><em>, </em><em>California</em><em>.
He can be reached at <span class="spamspan"><span class="u">jim.rue</span> [at] <span class="d">gmail [dot] com</span></span></em></p>





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