What one victim of junk email is doing:
Subject: Re: CyberPromo's "Unprecedented Move"?
From: atari@teleport.com (Rich Tietjens)
Date: 1997/05/07
On 6 May 1997 05:48:12 , EFGriffith wrote:
>So what's the deal with Spammy's "Major Announcement" of an "Unprecedented
>Move" against an "Anti-spammer"? Gee, you don't suppose he was blowing
>smoke out of his ample nether regions, do you? *yawn*.
Frankly, I don't believe he'd recognize the truth if it jumped up and
bit him on the ass. Of course, /it/ would then spit him out and run to
the nearest gas pump so it could get that taste out of its mouth...
This is going via certified mail to the address indicated in tomorrow's
snail mail, along with roughly fifty pages (real paper pages) of
supporting documents:
Bureau of Consumer Protection
Philadelphia Office
Second Floor
21 South 12th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107
This is a continuation sheet. Please see complaint form this date,
complaint against CyberPromotions, Incorporated and Sanford Wallace,
8001 Castor Avenue, Suite #127, Philadelphia, PA 19152.
I am requesting the assistance of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Consumer
Protection in causing CyberPromotions, Inc., and Sanford Wallace to
cease and desist from the following activities against me:
1. Extortion
2. Theft of services
3. Harrassment by wire
4. Violations of the "junk fax" law (Title 47 USC para 227) in conspiracy with Apex Global Internet Services (agis.net), a business registered in Michagan.
5. Fraud
6. Denial of Service attacks
7. Deliberately misleading advertising with the intent to commit wire fraud.
Complaints in detail:
1. Extortion: CyberPromotions, Inc. and Sanford Wallace (apparently
the sole owner of cyberpromo.com, savetrees.com, ispam.net,
answerme.com, and numerous other aliases) exists for the sole purpose of
sending unsolicited commercial email, allegedly to millions of email
addresses ("2.3 million" according to his Internet Web page - see
Inclosure 1). This junk email is sent to people who have repeatedly
stated both publicly (See Inclosure 4 for my most-public statement
regarding junk email) and privately (in email to various addresses
provided by Wallace) that they do not want his email. I have sent
numerous requests to his "remove" addresses, beginning as early as
September 1996; yet I continue to receive junk email from Wallace and
his various Internet aliases. Now he offers to sell me a "filter" to
protect me from the junk email that he, according to his own public Web
page, has created. This is extortion, plain and simple. "Buy my filter
or continue to suffer under the barrage of junk mail that I spew forth"
seems to be his philosophy. I might point out that his filter won't
even operate on more than thirty percent of the desktop computers used
to access the Internet (including three of the five I use in my
business), nor on the vast majority of Internet servers.
2. Theft of Services: Access to the Internet is not free of charge.
Even if I did not have to pay for access (one of my accounts is "free"
in that sense), my Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must pay for the
large-bandwidth connections to the Internet, must purchase disk storage
space proportional to the expected volume of traffic, and must purchase
computers adequate to process that traffic. If the volume of traffic
increases significantly (which it does every time CyberPromotions or any
other "junk emailer" sends out 2.3 million messages), either the ISP
must purchase more bandwidth, more disk storage, and faster computers,
or the ISP's quality of service will be degraded. Since degraded
service leads directly to loss of business, most ISPs choose to purchase
the necessary equipment and bandwidth to maintain their level of
service. This translates directly into increased costs to the consumer
- me, in this case - but has NO effect on CyberPromotions, since he is
sending from a single server to hundreds or thousands of others and his
"quality" of service is of no importance. Thus, every time Wallace
sends junk email, I (and all other addressees) must pay to receive his
junk email - and there is no effective means of refusing it before
delivery; the junk mail has been delivered by the time it is detected,
and thus I have already paid for it.
3. Harrassment by Wire: Wallace has been notified innumerable times
that I do NOT want to receive his email, yet he continues to flood my
email inbox with junk mail. This causes me distress, and in fact has
caused me to lose business when my 100-message limit has been exceeded
(I have received as many as 843 junk emails in one day).
4. Conspiracy to Violate Title 47 USC para 227 (the "junk fax" law):
Sanford Wallace is well aware that every computer connected to the
Internet via modem, and equipped with a printer port, meets the
definition of a "facsimile receiver" under Title 47. In addition, the
majority of my Internet postings carry a warning to the effect that all
email sent to my account is automatically printed on a facsimile
receiver. Wallace's bandwidth provider, Apex Global Internet Services,
has been notified that he is violating Federal law every time junk email
is sent to my account, and has refused to take any action to prevent
future violations.
5. Fraud: Wallace's Web page advertises "Block-proof autoresponders"
and at the same time, his "e-Filter" software; the one is purported to
be able to send email to any address with no possibility of the
addressee refusing it or deleting it unread, while the other purports to
be able to delete unread any undesired message. It is impossible that
both claims are true, as they are obviously mutually exclusive.
In addition, all of Wallace's recent junk email has contained a IP
address of "000.000.000.000" which is deliberately inserted to prevent
servers which are so configured from returning his junk mail to his
server; that is an invalid address, and thus the burden of disposing of
undeliverable junk email has been transferred to the destination server,
rather than the sender (returning undeliverable email to the sender is
the "mandated" disposition under currently governing Internet operating
guidelines, also known as "RFCs" and places the burden of proper
disposition on the sender). This is fraudulent computer access in my
opinion and should be seperately pursued under Title 18 USC. Of course,
I am not a lawyer, merely a citizen who must defend himself under the
law as best he can.
6. Denial of Service Attacks: As previously stated, I have a
100-message limit in my email inbox. I depend upon email for the
majority of my business needs. When junk email fills my inbox, I am
unable to receive inquiries or orders from my legitimate customers.
Since I am aware of how annoying and potentially damaging such junk mail
can be, I never send unsolicited commercial email. However, on at least
three ocassions, I have been prevented from accessing legitimate
customer email by the sheer volume of junk mail in my email inbox.
Wallace is the worst offender, often sending the same junk email (with
no differences other than the X-UIDL line) many times to the same
address. See Inclosures 9, 10, and 11, and 12, 13, 14, and 15 for two
examples that were sent numerous times - I have included only three
copies of one and four of the other (with the main body of some deleted
to save space and paper), but received many more.
7. Deliberately misleading advertising with intent to commit wire
fraud: Inclosures 12 through 15 present a misleading advertisement
designed to entice the addressee into calling a number in the "664" area
code. This is a long-distance call to somewhere in the Caribbean; the
cost of the call is $1.57 per minute. The owner is unlisted, so I
regret that I am unable to to provide that information.
Summary of Inclosures:
Inclosure 1 is a printout of Cyber Promotions' and Wallace's Internet
home page.
Inclosure 2 is a promotional description of "Cyber-Bomber," Wallace's
email/mail-bombing program. Description taken from Wallace's home page.
Inclosure 3 is a promotional description of "e-Filter," Wallace's email
filtering/mail-bomb defense program. Description taken from Wallace's
home page.
Inclosure 4 is my "Spam Offer" which clearly states "I do not want to
receive uninvited solicitations by email" and is prominently posted on
my Internet Web page at http://www.teleport.com/~atari/spamoff.htm for
public viewing.
Inclosure 5 is an independent statement taken from an Internet Web page
without the author's (Mark J. Welch) knowledge; the URL is given near
the top of the printed page if you wish to verify it.
Inclosure 6 is a summary of the "author profile" showing that
"sandpipr@vr-net.com" has posted only one article on the Internet,
cross-posted to two newsgroups, both of which relate to abuse of the
Internet. It may be reasonably inferred that people posting articles in
these newsgroups are not disposed to receive junk email with equinamity.
The message itself has been printed and displays the "X-Legal-Warning"
header (which is truncated on this printed copy) warning that the
address is a fax machine, and that sending email to this address is a
Federal crime.
Inclosure 7 is the results of that single newsgroup posting (see
Inclosure 6); within 5 days, a junk email was sent to the
sandpipr@vr-net.com account from "savetrees.com" which is another
Wallace alias. I apologize for the poor quality of the print - my wife
uses Netscape as her newsreader and didn't know how to print all of the
message headers.
Inclosure 8 is an example of one of the many messages automatically
forwarded for printing from my atari@teleport.com account. Please note
that it originated at savetrees.com and was sent by "Cyber-Bomber"
through the ispam.net network - all of which are owned and operated by
Sanford Wallace. This message also touts the "e-Filter" extortion
scheme originated by Wallace.
Inclosures 9, 10, and 11 are substantively identical messages sent by
Wallace advertising a "credit line" of dubious value. Note that
answerme.com (the autoresponder address given in the body of the
message) is another Wallace property.
Inclosures 12, 13, 14, and 15 are substantively identical messages from
Wallace's various properties, advertising a probable scam, and giving
the $1.57 per minute Caribbean telephone number for contact by the
gullible.
Inclosure 16 is a message sent by Wallace's properties advertising a
pager service. I have contacted the pager company, and they have stated
that they were unaware of the means of advertising, which I am inclined
to beleive; they have also received numerous complaints (most of which
were probably not particulary pleasant, judging from the patient but
unhappy young lady to whom I spoke).
All of the messages sent by Wallace's properties are unsolicited and
purport to relay mail from other sources. However, it should be noted
that, with the exception of the final destination address, all
identifiable addresses in the message headers are owned and operated by
Sanford Wallace. This can be verified by using "whois" from any Unix
terminal to identify the billing contact for each domain as listed in
the InterNIC database.
Thank you for your assistance.
Sincerely,
[signed]
Richard C. Tietjens
atari@teleport.com postmaster@atarinet.portland.or.us
[Public Usenet posting, from news.admin.net-abuse.email]