When he learned the hard way he'd been blacklisted as a spammer – despite his not being the source of several rounds of spam made to look as though he'd been its creator – graphic designer Andy Markley decided to hit back. And, it paid off when he turned out to have chased infamous spammer Eddy Marin off yet another Internet service provider, once Markley discovered just who his tormentor really was.
"I've lost hundreds of hours of billable time and my company reputation has been damaged by association with spam," he told Wired. "And while there's some comfort in having the plug pulled on this creep, he'll probably find another provider and start all over again…"I realize that what happened to me is nothing compared to stuff like the war in Iraq or the 9/11 attacks. But it really did serious damage to me and my business. As far as I'm concerned, spammers are nothing more than electronic home-invasion gangs."
The trouble began, the magazine said, when Markley, otherwise gearing up for a work-free Labor Day weekend, decided just to check his e-mail inbox before his planned holiday. He found hundreds of e-mails, most reporting undeliverable messages from his account, some featuring "angry rants accusing Markley" of spamming pharmaceuticals without prescriptions.
"Markley isn't a spammer, he's a graphic artist," the magazine continued. "He was the victim of a con artist who sent thousands of spam messages carefully crafted to appear as if they had originated from Markley's domain." It forced Markley to take down his graphic design business site and replace it with a page warning people he wasn't the brains behind the spam campaign in question. Then, he went to work to put a stop to it.
First, he switched ISPs to EarthLink, themselves rather facile in fighting and beating spammers, who promised him they'd back him up by treating any spam attack on him as an attack on their own site, Wired said. The trouble was, a week after he made the move, Markley was hit again by the same spammer with the same campaign, using Markley's domain, and he was hit again five days later, with EarthLink telling Markley they couldn't help him, so Markley – by his own description "an artist, not a geek" – went hunting.
"I was dragged kicking and screaming into the online world," he told Wired." But I grew to love the Internet, and it makes me furious that spammers are taking advantage of all of us to peddle garbage that no one in their right minds would want. Plus I was quickly losing my business and my mind. I decided I had to do something, had to figure out how to find this guy and stop him."
Checking headers on the original spam, teaching himself to access domain-registry information and using trace-route programs, helped Markley work through an estimated half dozen hijacked servers and twice that many spoofed e-mails and identities to find his spammer, Wired said, before finally isolating that it was Marin around September 25.
He tracked Marin's then-current ISP, WCG.net, informed their tech support staff of what was done to him, and "within a few hours," Wired said, Marin's account there was kaput.
"I was amazed that the only help I received from any Internet service provider came from the company that was hosting a spammer's account," Markley told Wired. "But WCG sounded sincerely surprised to find out the infamous Eddy Marin was one of their customers." Though he didn't try contacting Marin himself, Markley told the magazine he'd happily join in any class action litigation against the spam king.
Based in Boca Raton, Florida, at last accounting, Marin has such a reputation in cyberspace that spam fighters Spamhaus.org considers him the number one most prolific and incessant spammer in cyberspace. Spamhaus was hit in August with a Florida-filed lawsuit said to be from spammers who may or may not have ties to Marin.
And if you believe the columnist Fred Grimm, of the Miami Herald, Boca Raton is practically bragging about being the spam capital of the world, perhaps because the otherwise pleasant Florida beach city has "such a startling number of…firms" linked to fraudulent schemes like fictitious vacation home time shares, contest prize 1-900 call numbers, and telemarketing scams, not to mention pre-approved loan scams.
"Boca, with help from Eddy Marin, has gone legit," Grimm wrote earlier this year. "Of course, Marin's might spam operations won't exactly enhance Boca's reputation. But at least they're legal
"Marin and other Internet entrepreneurs based in Boca have conferred yet another superlative on their town," the column continued, citing two British newspapers calling Boca the spam capital of the world.
"But one should note that spam is not illegal," Grimm continued. "That's a major improvement on his résumé," noting Marin's 1990 conviction for running a major Broward County cocaine ring which implicated a former county judge, not to mention his "dabbl(ing) in Internet porn and…money laundering charges."
Marin, the columnist concluded, "presents a near-perfect front man for the most hated industry in the high-tech world. Probably, the town fathers won't nominate Eddy, however successful, for Boca businessman of the year. But at least spam's legit. For Boca, that's a step up."
