STORY: Let Me Learn You

That was a typo. Sorry. LET ME TEACH YOU, that’s what it’s meant to say… this post is educational.

Do you hate Spam? Sure, we all do. But do you know anything about it? You will. Follow me people.

I used to get hundreds of pieces of Spam per day. Really, there was so much in my inbox I had to change my address. It was the only way. But what the deal-y-o? Who sends this crap? And why? And what made them think I was so desperate for herbal penis enlargement or fine Mexican Donkey porn? I decided to find out.

STEP ONE: Call the only person I know who’s internet savvy enough to know the answer, Brian Batjer. Brian told me to read a book call Spam Kings. It was interesting, but that’s not the way I operate.

STEP TWO: Contact a spammer. Don’t ask how, but I figured out the home number of one of the biggest spammers in the world. Let’s just call him Mr. R. After a million and one calls, including several where I talked to his very-gun-shy-but-sweet wife, I gave up.

Then about a week later he called me back.

Turns out his daughter is a fan of my web-site and told him I’m a pretty decent guy (thanks Miss Jr. R). We talked for about an hour or so, but at the end he said he wasn’t comfortable having me up to the Detroit home-base of his operation. Though he feels he isn’t doing anything wrong—it’s freedom of speech as far as he’s concerned and should be protected by the first amendment—the government seems to feel otherwise.

Luckily, the “bulk-mail” game is a small one and all of the big players know one another, so as a conciliation-prize he called a friend of his; arguably the world’s largest LEGAL-Spammer. A guy named Scott Richter.

STEP THREE: A quick call to Jet Blue. A flight to Denver (this was a few months back, otherwise I would’ve scheduled a Colorado date—what, you forgot about 50DATES in 50STATES? Don’t. I’m still looking for participants). And next thing I knew I was face to face with Richter… well sitting on the side-lines anyway. It was hockey night when I arrived.







Turns out Scott’s a pretty interesting guy.

He’d made his first $500,000 before he graduated high school (with vending machines—he asked his mom for a gumball machine for his birthday and things just kind of spiraled from there).

At 21 he was the youngest person in Denver to get a liquor license.



He was the founder of Great Scott’s Eatery, a 24-hour diner chain I’d actually be to years before… it was Dog the Bounty Hunter’s favorite.



And remember when General Tommy Frank first showed those terrorist trading cards on TV? Well it made an impression on Scott too. Within hours he’d made an ad for them and was “bulk emailing” it around the world, even though he didn’t actually have the cards and hadn’t figured out where to get them. Before the night was done he’d made $700,000 and wound up delivering them to satisfied customers almost three weeks before Wal-Mart.



He can even manage a pretty decent smile when he wants to.



But it was the billion pieces of spam her sends out per day that I'd come to find out about. Actually, not really. It’s not spam if you asked for it.


(the sign on Richter’s office building door)

See, that’s the hook, the loophole New York’s Attorney General and Microsoft learned when they ganged-up on Richter & Co. with matching $20 million dollar lawsuits, but walked away empty-handed. If you’re getting spam from Richter, and you probably are as he collects somewhere around 46,000 new names per day to mail it to, it’s only because you asked for it. And what’s worse, you never asked him to stop (well, 7,000 people do per day, but he respects their wishes).



Ever send someone an e-card? Enter to win something on line? Take a look at free porn that required “age verification” before you could see it? Yeah, well, you probably forgot to unclick the box marked “would you like to receive similar offers from our affiliates” before hitting send and in doing so, you legal gave him the right to “direct market”-you, oh, anytime he wants. You opted in.



Want to know what’s worse, for it to be legal spam (that’s a piece of spam from an opt-in list, with readable headers identifying it’s origin, for all you tech nerds out there) it needs to have an opt out link at the bottom. “Did you receive this in error? Want to be taken off our list? Click here.” Why does no one click there? Scott seems to think it’s cause people believe it’ll only bring more junk-mail their way… and he’s probably right.

The guy is a genius. Check this out:
Take, for example, this online ad designed to get you to opt (CLICK HERE)… all you have to do is put your zip-code in to see if you’ve won a free ipod. This is real, he sends out close to $15,000 worth of them per month and ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS PUT IN YOUR ZIP-CODE. But as soon as you do it takes you to another page with some of your info auto-filled in. This is where you opt in. See Scott knows 40% of people will fill out that next page. In fact, he’s so sure of it, he’s willing to pay me $1 for each person I send his way that even puts in their zip-code. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS PUT IN YOUR ZIP-CODE. Do you see where I’m going with this? Help a brother out… PLEASE NOTE: There may be a pop-up attached. I can't tell; I use FireFox which blocks all that crap.

Pretty much the same deal here (CLICK THIS ONE TOO)… put your zip code in for some free doughnuts, opt in or don’t and I’ll get another $1.

Do it again with the ad below and I get another $1.50.



And $1.25.



I was going to call this post Playing With Fire? What do you think? It'll only take 5 digits and you could earn the Jakester $1 or 4 (feel free to do it from multipal computers to multiply those numbers). PS—Don't worry, this will be the only time we play this game. Promise. No ads like this again. Never. I'm just eager to get my dating on and whilee the best things in life are free, travel rarely is.