Martijn Bevelander began as a 17-year-old Internet wunderkind and may end up as a fallen angel. That's in the wake of the BBC exposing him as a mass spammer (porn and otherwise) who hosted among others a South American "spam gang" that may have used the Sobig virus series to hijack a major corporate computer network to spam for a Website promoting Russian brides.
Bevelander's apparent fall began when a number of Dutch Internet companies and American spam fighters spotted a rise in spam from the so-called Low Countries, as the London Register, and traced it to Superzonda, a South American group "which may have used the Sobig virus to install open proxies on end-users machines, (and) hijacked British Airways' computers without its knowledge to advertise a Website called beautifulwomentodate.com."
Bevelander also owned Cyber Angels, an Amsterdam company considered a particularly relentless spam operation, but dropped it within days of BBC Radio 4 exposing his activities July 1. Bevelander reportedly dropped Cyber Angels to cover his trail, and within an hour of that, according to various reports, Dutch spam-fighting group Spamvrij.nl bought it. They use it to catch and bury any remaining spam-related communications to or from Bevelander and his former partners, but they also publish numerous information reports about Bevelander's activities.
"Cyberangels (were) major spammers and spam facilitators," the new owners said on the newly revised Website, estimating Superzonda responsible for about 20-30 million spam messages a day and alluding to Bevelander's apparent history as a domain hijacker.
"When the first big story about possible connections between Bevelander and Cyberangels was published, things speeded up fast," Spamvrij.nl says. "Bevelander denied most and admitted some, then later on, he denied everything. Currently, he claims that he merely registered cyberangels.nl and .be when he was a domain hijacker…Meanwhile, several other Dutch ISPs have decided to no longer peer with Bevelander's Megaprovider."
Bevelander's original company, Bevelander Internet Services, went bankrupt in 2002. Various networking partners in the Netherlands and elsewhere have been reported dropping away from Bevelander and his business entities at an accelerating pace since the BBC expose, all but crippling Megaprovider's ability to function as an ISP.
Bevelander also reportedly teamed up with "Married But Lonely" American spammer Brian Westby, bagged earlier this year for a mass spam campaign involving bland subject lines and fake return e-mail addresses, not to mention dead reply or opt-out links, in a months-long stream of porn spam. Westby was said to be on the board of directors of a Bevelander concern, MAPS, which the Register said had nothing to do with a spam-fighting group of the same name. Westby left the group two months ago, the paper added.
