Former spammer: 'I know I'm going to hell'

IDG News Service - "Ed," a retired spammer, built a considerable fortune sending e-mails that promoted pills, porn and casinos. At the peak of his power, Ed says he pulled in $10,000 to $15,000 a week, storing the money in $20 bills in stacks of boxes.

It was a life of greed and excess, one that preyed especially on vulnerable people hoping to score drugs or win money gambling on the Internet. From when he was expelled from high school at 17 until he quit his spam career at 22, Ed -- who does not reveal his full name but sometimes goes by Spammer-X -- was part of an electronic underworld profiting from the Internet via unsolicited commercial e-mails.

"Yes, I know I'm going to hell," said Ed, who spoke in London today at an event hosted by IronPort Systems Inc., a security vendor owned by Cisco Systems Inc. "I'm actually a really nice guy. Trust me."

Ed is quick-witted and affable, but there was a time when he wasn't so nice. He sent spam to recovering gambling addicts enticing them to visit gambling Web sites. He used the e-mail addresses of people known to have bought anti-anxiety medication or antidepressants and targeted them with pharmaceutical spam.

In short, Ed said, he was "basically what people hate about the Internet."

He spent 10 hours a day, seven days a week studying how to send spam and avoid filtering technologies in security software designed to weed out garbage e-mail. Most spam filters are effective 99% of the time. Ed aimed for that remaining window, using tricks such as including slightly different images in his spam, which can fool filters into thinking the e-mail is legitimate.

"The better I got at spam, the more money I made," Ed said.

He would start a spam run by finding an online merchant who wanted to sell a product. Then he'd acquire a list of e-mail addresses, another commodity that has spawned its own market in the world of spam. He'd also set up a domain name, included a link in a spam message that, if clicked, would redirect the recipient to the merchant's Web site, enabling Ed to get credit for the referral.

The spam would then be sent from a network of hacker-controlled computers, called botnets. Those machines are often consumer PCs infected with malicious software that a hacker can control. Ed would "rent" time on those computers from another group of hackers who specialized in creating botnets.

If one of the spam recipients bought something, Ed would get a percentage of the sale. For pharmaceuticals, the commission was around 50%, he said.