Blacklist of Internet Advertisers

==================================================================
Canter and Siegel acknowledge Blacklist's importance in interview:

                           "On the day
         the anti-advertising vandals can convince customers
               not to buy from Usenet advertisements,
               that is the day advertising will stop."

==================================================================

• 1. What is this?
• 2. Who gets on the list, and for how long?
• 3. What is the philosophy behind it?
• 4. Spam, Velveeta, ... what are you talking about?
• 5. What can I do with the blacklist?
• 6. What if I wanted to punish YOU?
• 7. How about other ways of dealing with commercial junk?
• 8. Who doesn't belong on this blacklist?
• 9. How to advertise on the Internet?
• 10. What other blacklists are out there?
• 11. How can I help?
• 12. How to give feedback?
• 13. The Blacklist in itself.

1. What is this?

The list is posted regularly to several newsgroups, stored on a number of FAQ archives around the world and the most recent version is always available on the WWW as http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/BL/. Titus Brown (http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~cbrown/) is kind enough to operate a temporary mirror of the list in the US. It is updated daily and accessible as http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~cbrown/BL/

If you read the non-html version and you don't know what to do with all the links given or what the WWW is or how to access it by email, send mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with the text

  send usenet/news.answers/www/faq/*

Whenever you see a link of the form "BL/something" here, you can get a valid WWW address by prepending the string "http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/" for the German version or "http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~cbrown/" for the US version of the list.

2. Who gets on the list, and for how long?

With "inappropriate commercials" I basically mean ads posted to unrelated newsgroups or mailing lists or to those which traditionally don't tolerate commercial messages. The number of complaints I receive is also a factor.

Everyone added to the blacklist gets notified so that they can correct possibly inaccurate information. As a general rule, people are taken off the list after 3 months unless they repeat their behaviour. Their entries are then moved to the archive at BL/archive.html for educational purposes. Note that the archive is not part of the blacklist as such.

3. What is the philosophy behind it?

4. Spam, Velveeta, ... what are you talking about?

Spam has its own page on the WWW: http://www.smalltime.com/nowhere/findthespam/ featuring a spam contest and many comments. More appropriate for our purposes is the SpamCam, featuring a frequently updated picture of rotting spam at http://www.fright.com/spam/spamcam.html. Spam was also the main ingredient in a hilarious Monty Python sketch: http://ic.net/~jheaton/spamskit.htm is the transcript and http://montypython.virtualave.net/sketchsounds.htm has some sound recordings and ftp://ftp.eskimo.com/u/k/kilroy69/pub/wavs/spamsong.wav is the song.
On the Internet, spam stands for the posting of multiple copies of the same (or slightly altered) article to many Usenet newsgroups, without crossposting them. This means that the article will be transmitted to and stored on every Usenet host multiple times: once for every newsgroup involved. EMP (Excessive Multi-Posting) is a different name for the same thing. The word spam is also used for bulk email: sending the same message to many people at once who haven't asked for it. By looking at the above Monty Python sketch, try to figure out why the word "spam" was chosen.

The Velveeta home page is at http://www.kraftfoods.com/velveeta/velv_index.html?B=13&L;=3.
On the Internet, Velveeta means the excessive crossposting of an article to many newsgroups, and is also known as ECP. "Crossposting" means that physically only one copy of the article travels round the world, but it will show up in many newsgroups. Most of the time, most of these newsgroups have nothing to do with the topic of the article.

Spam is much worse than Velveeta (try it!). Recently, more and more mixtures of the two appeared: many copies of an article, each of which crossposted to a large number of newsgroups. Some call this "jello".

For the definite source of definitions for these terms (and also for a nice formula measuring the badness of jello), refer to the FAQ "Current Usenet spam thresholds and guidelines" at http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~tskirvin/home/spam.html

For the purposes of this list, I won't make a distinction between spam, velveeta and jello - if the ad ends up in a wrong newsgroup, then it is by (my) definition inappropriate advertising and will be recorded. The worst of all is of course bulk email.

5. What can I do with the blacklist?

• Boycott the advertising business. Tell your friends about the boycott and the reasons behind it.
• Send them or their sysadmins a message informing them that you disapprove of their behavior. If a phone number is given, you might want to try to call them collect. 1-800 numbers are also always warmly welcomed. The 1-800 directory is at http://www.anywho.com/tf.html. Note that you should always use a public phone when calling a 1-800 number: the standard caller ID feature of 800 numbers will be useless and the call will be more expensive for the recipient.
• If the blacklisted business is a so-called "WWW mall" which sells advertising space to other businesses, you might want to inform these advertisers about the blacklist entry and about possible consequences for their profits.
• You can send a note (by registered mail) to the email junk mailers, informing them that you will charge $500 for proofreading every commercial email originating from them. If one arrives, send out an invoice, then sue them in small claims court; you will win since they won't show up. (Your argument in court is essentially a "shrink wrapped license" type of argument; shrink wrapped licenses are possibly not legally binding but they have never been tested in court, so take your chances, as Microsoft does). Then immediately turn the account over to a collection agency: this will add collection fees and interest to the amount, and it will ruin their credit rating. A nice official sounding notice was written by Michael Kielsky and is available at BL/demand.txt. Some people advocate billing the spammer's access provider instead. See http://www.blarg.net/~gyro/money/money.htm for details. You can read a real world account of an access provider billing a remote spammer at http://www.kclink.com/spam/index.html. The bill is now with the collection agency and the spammers are about to be taken to court. I would like to have some more reports about real world experiences with this approach.
• Put them in your kill file, so that you'll never see an usenet article written by them again. Read the documentation of your news reader about kill files. The kill mechanism of rn-style newsreaders is explained in the killfile-faq, available via anon ftp from ftp.cs.columbia.edu in the directory /archives/pub/usenet/news/answers.
• Filter them out of your mailbox. If you read mail on a unix host, you can get more information about how to use the programs procmail, mailagent or filter for this task from the Mail filtering and Robots page http://www.ii.com/internet/robots/
  Much more in-depth, technical and comprehensive information about the information filtering problem in general is available from Doug Oard's Information Filtering Resources Page at http://www.clis.umd.edu/dlrg/filter/
  For a completely free mail client that includes excellent mail filtering capabilites and pgp encryption and runs under Windows, OS/2 and MacOS, check out Pegasus Mail at http://www.let.rug.nl/pegasus/
• Use procmail and an AI engine like emacs doctor to engage them in a fake mail dialog.
• If they operate an automatic mail-back robot, you could test their intelligence by sending them an e-mail with FROM or REPLY-TO header containing their own address. There are many other fun things one can do with these robots.
• Say individuals A and B are on the list. You can send an e-mail message to B with fake FROM-header A saying "I'm interested in your product/service." In this fashion, the advertisers will end up on each other's mailing lists. Or create a mailing list of known spammers and their sysadmins and use the list's address in the From line if you post to usenet or complain to other spammers. Oh, how we love exponentially growing junk, if the spammers are drowning in it!
• Have a look at the shell script BL/fletch.txt and reflect about possible uses :-)
• If you are a system admin, you could stop forwarding mail or news originating from them. Or, if the culprit owns their own domain, you can deny them access to your ftp, gopher, telnet, irc, nntp, smtp and WWW servers. Blocking smtp ports is particularly appropriate for email spammers: it will cause their sendmail spool to fill up with their own excrement.
• If you operate a cancelbot, you could automatically cancel all usenet postings originating from them. Note however that the noble Cancelmoose[tm] (see point 7) strongly disapproves of this behavior.
• alt.revenge
• If you want to do some of the more automated things, here is a script that extracts the raw information from the list:

       lynx -dump http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/BL/ |
            sed -n /===Blacklist start===/,/===Blacklist end===/p |
            your_script_goes_here
         

• And for the truly perverse: since the unedited texts of all ads are provided, you can use this list as the ultimate Zombie Cyber Mall[tm].

6. What if I wanted to punish YOU?

If you want to do it right though, you'll have to start a Blacklist of Blacklist Maintainers.

Also, please keep the threats of legal action coming - you don't do it in vain: the most amusing ones are published as BL/threats.txt while flames go to BL/flames.txt

Moreover, all usenet postings concerning the Blacklist will have the word "Blacklist" somewhere in the subject line. Put it in your kill file and you won't have to hear about it ever again.

7. How about other ways of dealing with commercial junk?

• First of all, you need to collect as much information as possible about the spammer and his connection to the net. You can get at him even he doesn't give his correct email address. The document http://kryten.eng.monash.edu.au/gspam.html#instructions has the details.
• Send a complaint to them or their sysadmin directly. On Unix, there's a neat script for doing that painlessly from within nn and rn-style newsreaders called adcomplain. It can be gotten from the author's homepage http://www.rdrop.com/users/billmc. It is a good idea to familiarize yourself with the various header fields of news and email articles; often it is very easy to spot if some spammer uses a bogus From-line (in which case you should still report the spam, but to the correct sysadmin). Having forged email headers will usually cost them their account. You can find out the proper email address to send complaints to from http://abuse.net
• Look around in benign newsgroups such as alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.bestiality or alt.sex.pedophilia; if you find a spam, hunt the spammer down and send a letter to his family listing a selection of the newsgroups he chooses to advertise in. The "author profile" feature of http://www.dejanews.com is especially helpful here. Another thing to do about smut spam: try to find a legitimate business operating from the same site as the spammer and send them "inadvertantly" a reply to the smut.
• You can use a mail filter such as procmail (a Unix program) together with self written filtering rules to make it impossible to send you commercial junk automatically. A much more powerful tool based on perl and also usable with procmail is despam at http://www.servtech.com/public/phoenix/computers/spam/despam.html. While Despam uses static (but updatable) patterns to detect email spam, the program "Spam Be Gone" at http://www.internz.com/SpamBeGone/ uses a more sophisticated machine learning approach. It works even with Eudora under Windows. Another filter to combat spam in all its forms is ByProxy, created by Besiex and available at http://www.besiex.org/ByProxy/index.html
• If you get an email ad with a valid return address, return it unread, with no comment. This will tie up their man hours, often lead them to reply to you asking if you really want their junk. You use the same procedure once again, or send them some attachment in a weird format. They think you're a wealthy newbie in trouble. Eat their time, like they eat your time.
• You can follow spam related discussions on the mailing list SPAM-L which resides on listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com
• Spammers reportedly cull email addresses from usenet and the web, in order to sell address lists. Putting lots of fantasy email addresses in signatures and on homepages will screw up their lists. Of course, you need to tell people why you do this. An elaboration of that idea is provided by Ronald Guilmette's cgi script wpoison which generates an infinite maze of web pages full of fake email addresses. You can get it from http://www.e-scrub.com/wpoison/
• A variation of this theme: create a special mail alias that you never use for posting or mailing. Create a web page, state that commercial email to that alias will be billed with $500 per message. Then sit back and wait for junk to arrive. You will have a strong case in court (shrink-wapped license).
• Chris Lewis cancels all usenet spam mercilessly. Read his reports posted to news.admin.net-abuse.usenet. More information about the net-abuse groups and net-abuse in general is contained in the FAQ, which is available as http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.html
• A while back, the Cancelmoose[tm] <moose@cm.org> did all the spam canceling, but now she is working on a different approach called NoCem. You can read more about it on the Moose's homepage at http://www.cm.org/nocem.html.
• If you operate you own news site, Rahul Dhesi's perl script unspam can help you in locally deleting spam - you won't have to wait for Cancelmoose[tm]'s cancel messages. However, it can't detect the spam - you need to know. It's at BL/unspam.txt. A more sophisticated tool is the Spam Hippo at http://www.spamhippo.com, a patch to the INN news software which detects and delets multiple postings, both those originating locally and those coming in from elsewhere.
• Douglas Rinckes has created a modification to the majordomo mailing list software that lets you filter out annoying spam messages if you operate a mailing list. It's at BL/majordom.txt.
• If you operate your own site, you could use procmail instead of sendmail as your system-wide mail delivery agent, which makes it much easier to filter out junk.
• Jonathan Kamens has recently posted his spam detector; it's at BL/spam_detect.txt.
• If the offender is from the US, you can run to Mama and whine about things like illegal money making pyramid schemes or deceptive advertising. Mama in this case is the FTC: Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Protection Bureau, Division of Advertising Practices, 6th St. and Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., Washington, DC 20580, (202) 326-3090, uce@ftc.gov
• Report investment fraud to the Securities and Exchange Commission at enforcement@sec.gov
• The U.S. law USC 18 section 2701 (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2701.html) prohibits the "intentional access without authorization of a facility through which an electronic communication service is provided." Junk emailers who have previously been prohibited from accessing services on your machine through the SMTP port might well be violating this law and are then subject to a fine of $250,000 and one year in prison for a first-time offense. Civil action can be brought, and damages are $1,000 or more.
• The case EarthLink v. Cyber Promotions at has established the precedent that sending mass email to a site that has prohibited you from doing so is trespassing.
• It is possible that the U.S. law USC 47 section 227(b)(C) (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/47/227.html), even though not intended to ban email spam, can also be used against junk emailers; this is due to the fact that most modern modem-equipped computers with an attached printer fit the definition of a fax machine in USC 47 section 227(a)(2). You can sue for $500 per violation; the court can increase this to $1500 if violator acted willfully or knowingly. The case Destination Ventures v. FCC, 46 F.3d 54 (9th Cir. 1995) held the ban on unsolicited fax advertisements to be constitutional, noting that the ads unfairly shifted costs to the recipients. Clearly, this argument applies to junk email as well (many two-way pagers and PDA's charge per incoming email, other users connect long-distance or with ISDN to their service provider and pay for download time). Robert Arkow filed a lawsuit based on this legal theory in 1995; the case was settled out of court, and terms can't be disclosed.
• Those people who believe that USC47 section 227(b)(C) does not apply to junk email are trying to broaden the law. The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email is at http://www.cauce.org/. For European efforts, check out EuroCAUCE at http://www.euro.cauce.org
• One person has reportedly recovered over $1000 in damages from a junk (snail-) mailer after having written a contract against junk mail on the back of a check (the "shrink-wrapped-license idea"). Read the report at BL/damages.html
• If you receive a scam that starts something like "Let me tell you how I made $100,000 easily...", track down the full name of the original sender. If they are from the US, the IRS would love to hear about it. Forward it to afried@nocs.insp.irs.gov or net-abuse@nocs.insp.irs.gov with a short explanation. Do not forward ordinary pyramid schemes or other spam to these addresses.
• Internet Service Providers should consider putting a "Spam Damages Clause" in their contracts in order to recover damages from spammers who operated from their system. You might want to urge your provider to do just that. For details about the concept, read http://com.primenet.com/spamking/spamdam.html
• A nice collection of all sorts of phony scams, many of which also featured on this Blacklist, has been put together by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service at http://www.usps.gov/websites/depart/inspect/consmenu.htm; there's also something called the National Fraud Information Center at http://www.fraud.com

8. Who doesn't belong on this blacklist?

Also, the common Get-Rich-Quick and Make-Money-Fast pyramid schemes don't belong on this list. They usually come from newbies who are scared to death by some 20 well-written flames, and I believe blacklisting them here would be too harsh a treatment. However, if you catch one of these idiots, you can make money fast. For details, read BL/idiots.txt. Legal information about money making pyramid schemes is available at BL/pyramid_legal.txt and also from the very comprehensive Make Money Fast Myth page at http://www.stopspam.org/usenet/mmf/index.html

A blacklist of Make-Money-Fast posters can be found at http://www.clark.net/pub/rolf/mmf/

If you are like me and fed up with real-world junk mail as well, check out the excellent Junkbusters pages at http://www.junkbusters.com. Especially take note of their cool information about 39 U.S.C section 4009 and the subsequent supreme court decision which allows U.S. citizens to issue prohibitory orders against junk mailers. I've tried it, and it works. Junkbusters also ship a free utility to get rid of advertising banners on the web.

9. How to advertise on the Internet?

If you must advertise on usenet, then the biz.* and *.marketplace groups are for you (not all at once!). As a general rule, you should read every group for at least a week before you post anything there. This way, you can find out what the group is all about and whether commercials are appreciated there. Note that *.forsale groups were created to accommodate users who want to sell some personal stuff and not for commercial ads. Also: the *.marketplace groups in local hierarchies like ny.* are only for products that have a genuine connection to that area, e.g. New York; it is not sufficient that you hope that someone from New York might want to buy your product. For information about these advertising newsgroups check out the Usenet Marketplace FAQ at http://www.fmn.net/FAQ/attitude.html

Never send out unsolicited commercial e-mail to individuals or mailing lists. Bad things will happen to you. Some people will tell you otherwise, usually because they intend to make money off you.

Here is a list of documents describing the netiquette and how it relates to advertising:

• Read the FAQs in the news.announce.newusers newsgroup, which are archived at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/by-newsgroup/news/news.announce.newusers.html. The Usenet primer by Chuq Von Rospach and the Usenet Posting Rules by Mark Horton are good places to start.
• An excellent paper explaining the rationale behind the netiquette is at BL/netmyths.html and has been contributed by Guy Berliner.

10. What other blacklists are out there?

There's now a wonderful Blacklist of Internet Service Providers who are friendly to spammers. It's a realtime Blacklist, which means that an ISP is put on the list as soon as spam is received. What's more, it's easy to join a network of providers which completely ignore and drop all email traffic originating from these assholes. Patches for popular email transport software are available. It's called the Realtime Blackhole List at the Maile Abuse Protection System, http://maps.vix.com. This site contains valuable information for honorable ISP's as well. This looks very much like the technical solution to email spam we have been waiting for so desparately.

A very comprehensive Blacklist of current email spammers ready for use in email blocking software is at http://www.webeasy.com:8080/spam/.

The Spam Archive at http://www.spam-archive.org/ has a huge list of past spamming email addresses. You can also forward received spam to them and they'll include it in their list.

The Anti-Spam Project at http://www.bitgate.com/spam/ is specifically targetted at junk email. It has a list of domains that send out junk email and a mail filter program ("BlackMail") that sysadmins can install to refuse all email from those sites, or filter incoming mail based on other criteria. BlackMail can also be used to prohibit outgoing spam from your domain. There's also a mailing list for discussion of spam fighting that you can join.

Adam Frey maintains the FAQ for the australian ads usenet hierarchy aus.ads at ftp://archie.au/usenet/FAQs/aus.ads.forsale/ with a Blacklist section at the end.

Eric Bernabe <ebernabe@anet-stl.com> maintains a Make-Money-Fast page which contains a blacklist-like section. It is at http://www.basenet.net/~ebernabe/makefast.html

Monica Cellio <mjc@telerama.lm.com> has a list of all people who have spammed her at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mjc/spam.html

Sarang Gupta <sarang@sarangworld.com> keeps a list of spammers and several good suggestions about what to do with them at http://www.sarangworld.com/800.shtml

The Eddy's keep a list of people or sites that spammed them, and block further emails from them. It's at http://www.iinc.com/~tyche/abused.htm

Sisyphus6 <sisyphus6@technologist.com> maintains a hilarious "MMF Hall of Humilation" at http://ga.to/mmf/ where spammers are exposed in an hilarious manner. You want your name and address to be visible forever to anyone with access to a search engine? Boy have I news for you! The same site hosts a database of Make-Money-Fast crap at http://ga.to/sisyphys/

Neil Schwartzman <neil@petemoss.com> maintains a list of junk mail with a ready-to-use procmail file that filters them out of your mailbox. It's at http://alcor.concordia.ca/topics/email/auto/procmail/spam/

Then there is a Lamer List at http://hnet.hutton.com/~mredrain/metoo.html put together by Michael Red Rain <sundancr@gate.net>. It contains the email addresses of people that posted "ADD ME TOO!!" articles.

The GIGO Game at http://www.mindspring.com/~mdpas contains a blacklist of junk emailers. It is put together by Mark Paschal <mdpas@mindspring.com>.

Robert Braver maintains a cool Telemarketer's Hall of Shame, complete with their home phone numbers :-), at http://telejunk.norman.ok.us/

The "Fight Spam Page" at http://spam.abuse.net featured a list of rogue domains and sites that allow spamming (discontinued because of legal threats). It's also a great resource for spam fighting efforts, contains a list of responsible ISPs, and is much more actively maintained than this Blacklist, and you can even sign something and join the campaign!

Last but not least, our warm and heartfelt thanks go out to Mr. Vladimir Fomin for compiling the Blacklist of Net.Nazis and Sandlot Bullies BL/net_nazis.html and to Dr John Grubor for taking the time to assemble the well researched list of Usenet Homosexuals BL/queer_list.html. Two outstanding pieces of research; the large overlap between these lists is evidence of a deep and intriguing and hitherto unnoticed statistical truth. I am particularly honored to be featured on both lists. Please check out the credentials of Dr Grubor at http://kendaco.telebyte.com/dharland/Grubor.FAQ.html

11. How can I help?

• If you encounter an instance of offensive advertising on the internet, post a copy (including all headers) to news.admin.net-abuse.usenet or news.admin.net-abuse.email. However, you should first browse over the last couple of Subject lines in that group to make sure that no one has reported that incident before. Then, you should use an informative Subject line yourself. (Read the charters of the groups at http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.html).
• It's especially important to report all instances of unsolicited commercial junk e-mail, since these can take up more bandwidth, are more intrusive and less visible than usenet postings.
• If you see an ad posted through one of the anonymous postng servers, please respond immediately and fake interest. You'll get a response, hopefully with a real e-mail address and can then report the real person behind the scam. The administrator of the anon service is usually given in the header or the signature of the anonymous article.
• If you see an ad which contains nothing but a Post Office Box number in the USA as contact address, you can get the true identity of the POB holder from the respective postmaster, if you provide them with a copy of the ad. This is the law: commercially used POB's are not confidential. Let me know about what you find out in this fashion.
• Check out the free "Spam Haters" software for Windows at http://www.compulink.co.uk/~net-services/spam/. It neatly automates the process of tracking down, insulting, and threatening spammers. Works with most email programs.
• Please start your own blacklist, especially if you disagree with some of the rules for getting on and off this list or if you would like to focus on a particular news hierarchy. Tell me about it and I will include a pointer to it here.
• Tell business people about the netiquette, i.e. point them to everything listed under point 9, below.
• If you are an Internet service provider, business or individual with your own homepage on the WWW and you're opposed to junk mail and spam, you might want to consider placing the No-Junk-Mail logo on your page (you could even turn it into a link to this page); it's available at BL/junkmail.gif and was designed by ReplyNet (http://www.reply.net/). Another version, by Rohan Exton, is at BL/junkmail2.gif. Still another, the purple ribbon, is at BL/prss1.gif. And then there is the banner of the Fight-Spam-Campaign at BL/spam-bar-1.gif and Jerry Dunn's BL/jospam.jpg
• Let me know about any creative suggestions for the answer to question 5.
• The blacklist and its archive are growing constantly. I'd appreciate it if someone could write an indexing tool which would allow search based on name, geographical location or e-mail address of offender. (Preferably with a form-based html interface.) Shouldn't be too difficult since the stuff is already formatted, but I don't have the time.
• Feel free to contact me if you find that any information in this document is inaccurate.
• Tell people about the Blacklist. Put it in your signature, or on your homepage, whatever.

12. How to give feedback?

Please don't use that site to complain about specific advertisers.

13. The Blacklist in itself

===Blacklist start===

ID:       CS941211
Name:     L. Canter, M. Siegel
Address:  3333 East Camelback Road, Suite 250, Phoenix, AZ 85260, USA
          Cybersell, P.O.Box 13510, Scottsdale, AZ 85267, USA
          Cybersell, 10245 E. Via Linda, Suite 222, Scottsdale,
          AZ 85258, USA
Phone:    (602) 661-3911, (602) 661-5202
Email:    73450.3565@CompuServe.COM
Entered:  1994/12/11
Changed:  1997/01/15
Behavior: The famous greencard lawyers. In 1994, they repeatedly sent
          out a message offering their services in helping to enter
          the US greencard lottery to almost all usenet newsgroups.
          (Note in passing: they charged $100 for their service, while
          participating in the greencard lottery is free and consists
          merely of sending a letter with your personal information at
          the right time to the right place.) When the incoming mail
          bombs forced their access provider to terminate their
          account, they threatened to sue him until he finally agreed
          to forward all responses to them. Read all about it with gopher
          gopher.well.sf.ca.us in Authors, Books.../Online Zines.
          They signed an agreement with their access provider, PSI, to
          refrain from sending out junk e-mail or spamming usenet.
          Nevertheless, they have repeatedly spammed usenet again,
          although the postings were quickly found and canceled by
          the cancelbot Cancelmoose[tm]. PSI has cut their USENET
          access.  They have since written a book, "How to Make a
          Fortune on the Information Superhighway" and founded an
          internet advertising company, Cybersell. The book promotes
          several advertising strategies on the internet including
          gathering addresses from usenet and sending out junk e-mail,
          posting commercials to inappropriate newsgroups, advertising
          on irc and even via talk. They basically contend that all
          these behaviors are legal and therefore ok.  They ridicule
          the terms "internet culture" and "netiquette" and claim that
          the internet, once all real-world laws are applied to it,
          will make a great source of income for attorneys.  Canter
          & Siegel were behind the grand Credit Repair Spam 
          and the Virtualmall spam. This finally forced their service
          provider, psi.com, to cut them off completely as of 1995/02/12.
          Update: At 1995/03/01, cyber.sell.com apparently
          acquired a new feed from sprint (800-669-8303). However,
          they can't be reached with ping yet. Sprint apparently has
          decided against providing access to them.
          On 1995/03/22, they spammed usenet again, this time with an
          ad for their book. A couple of interesting things to note
          about this one:
            - They spammed from two accounts, one on netcom and one on
              crl. The accounts have been nuked.
            - They put certain usenet hosts in the path line, so that
              their spam wouldn't reach these hosts, thereby trying
              to avoid the spam cancelers. To no avail, of course.
            - They systematically varied From and Subject headers, again
              hoping to avoid being canceled.
            - They forged Approved-headers, so that their ad appeared
              in several moderated newsgroups.
            - The spam spilled into several mailing lists, prompting
              the following anti-spamming policy from the Debian
              mailing list: BL/debian.txt.
          The Water Spam, also orchestrated by C&S, shows similar
          characteristics.
Remarks:  Don't bug the owners of cybersell.com; they were the access
          providers for (and hence victims of) C&S during their
          first spam and acquired the domain name cybersell
          immediately - very much in the spirit of creative punishment
          :-) It appears though that that C&S now (1997/01/15)
          owns cybersell.com after all.

ID:       AD941223
Name:     Jess Guim, Advanz Home Office Companion
Address:  319 East 95th Street, Dept. 2, New York, NY 10128-5761, USA
Email:    adhoc@ix.netcom.com
Entered:  1994/12/23
Changed:  1995/01/21
Behavior: Posted their ads about desktop publishing to several
          rec.food groups.
          Advertises his tool for creating e-mail lists of potential
          customers via unsolicited e-mail. When complaining to him,
          he sends even more information about his program.
Remarks:  He claims to give a 30 days money-back guarantee on his
          products.           

ID:       TM941223
Name:     TMI
Phone:    voice: 408-429-5400, fax: 408-429-6100
Email:    tmi@scruznet.com
Entered:  1994/12/23
Changed:  1995/01/21
Behavior: Spammed the soc.culture hierarchy with ads for discount
          telephone service. Repeated it even after having been
          blacklisted.
          They recently tried to find out Cancelmoose[tm]'s spam
          criteria by posting a sequence of low-volume spams, which
          were classified as part of one big spam and hence canceled.
Remarks:  They have now their own domain, tmi.org, but continue to use
          the newsserver of scruznet.com.

ID:       KL950105
Name:     Kevin Jay Lipsitz a.k.a. Krazy Kevin, Magazine Club Inquiry
          Center
Address:  350 Richmond Terrace #5-P, Staten Island, NY 10301
          PO Box 990, Staten Island, NY 10312
Phone:    718-967-1234, 718-967-1550 (fax),
          718-967-1144 (fax), 800-433-1357
Email:    krazykev@escape.com, krazykev@kjl.com
          lipsitz@ingress.com
Entered:  1995/01/05
Changed:  1997/01/15
Behavior: Spammed almost the whole usenet repeatedly with anonymous
          ads (Hi, my name is Anne Nelson...") for a long distance
          calling plan. He was warned by the admin of the anon server,
          then lost his account there and did it again with a new
          account.  He told me on the phone that a company called Card
          Call USA, INC.  6232 N. 7th ST. #109 Phoenix, AZ 85014
          Phone: 602-264-7000 Fax: 602-266-0687 uses a pyramid-like
          promotion scheme where every customer gets a commission for
          each new customer they bring and in turn for each new
          customer these new ones bring and so on up to level 7.
          Kevin Lipsitz is a customer of Card Call USA and tries to
          bring new customers to get these commissions.  His using the
          anon server is evidence enough that he knew that he was
          doing something wrong.  Incidentally, he sent me the
          membership application for CC USA. Point #6 of the contract,
          which Kevin most probably signed, reads: "6. I agree to
          operate in a lawful, ethical, and moral manner and to do
          nothing that will adversely reflect upon CCUSAI, its clients
          or its other Independent Sales Representatives. I understand
          that any act deemed by CCUSAI to be detrimental to CCUSAI,
          in any manner, is grounds for the termination of my status
          as Independent Sales Representative and all corresponding
          commissions."  As of 1995/02/20, he uses the new e-mail
          address at escape.com.  On 1995/02/26, he anon-spammed
          again, this time advertising his magazine club.  It occurred
          again on 1995/03/04.  He is also the source of the
          ubiquitous and persistent "===>> World's *Cheapest*
          Way to get USA Magazine Subscriptions..."  postings and
          email list spams. The return address of these is often a FAX
          server. If you see a line "Hi, my name is <insert favorite
          female>", then it's from him. There have been complaints
          that he doesn't deliver all ordered magazines.
          Still spamming mailing lists as of 1996/04/30. Now uses
          throwaway AOL accounts.
          Has received a court order to stop using AOL addresses in
          summer 96.
Remarks:  I tracked him down by answering to one of his ads using an
          old e-mail address, to which he promptly responded.  The
          second time, I responded again to his anon ad, and he
          apparently recognized me and tried to harass me over the
          phone. Next was a truly pathetic first attempt at
          mailbombing. [Kevin, next time pick an ftpmail service
          without per day traffic limits, jeeez] His account on
          panix.com is no more.  An excellent analysis of one of his
          recent postings and lots of personal information about him
          is at BL/kl_info.txt Recently,
          several articles about him, including cancel reports, have
          been canceled from news.admin.net-abuse.misc.  As of
          1996/05/01, he owns his own domain kjl.com; internet access
          is provided by escape.com and connect2.com. Complaints
          should properly go to roman@escape.com, the administrator of
          escape.com and jolsin@connect2.com, the coordinator of
          connect2. Escape.com is unresponsive; access is provided by
          sprintlink.net. Mail to root@kjl.com is pointless since this is
          Kevin himself.  His 1-800 number reaches him, even though he
          usually comes up with some bogus denial. Recently, an
          analysis of one of his email list assaults has been posted
          at http://www.iac.co.jp/~issho/stop-spam.html
          The National Fraud Information Center is collecting
          information about him; read BL/kk_fraud.txt and http://www.fraud.org/news/1997/jul97/070897.htm
          If you feel that
          some of his activities are criminal (involving fraud,
          harassment or theft of services, for example), you might
          wish to send a succinct letter to
              Supervisory Agent Robert E. Schlabach
              FBI
              1 Center Plaza, Suite 600
              Boston, MA 02108
              USA

ID:       KK950105
Name:     Kim Kerns, Applied Information Technologies, Inc.
Address:  POB 2634, Midlothian, VA 23113, USA
Phone:    704-559-5988, 800-576-5146, 804-378-8050
Email:    applied@vnet.net, BYNH09A@prodigy.com, lorcine@aol.com 
Entered:  1995/01/05
Changed:  1995/01/09
Behavior: Spammed many newsgroups with a long distance calling plan. Varied
          subject lines, posting sites and exact text, apparently to avoid
          cancelbots.
          The company selling the phone service is Applied Information
          Technologies, Inc., POB 2634, Midlothian, Va. 23113. This company
          employs a promotion scheme offering commission to every customer
          for each call people sponsored by them make.
          After being blacklisted and notified about it, he did it again
          repeatedly.
Remarks:  Note the 1-800 number. He doesn't seem to own vnet, so you
          can put pressure on his postmaster.

ID:       CY950121
Name:     Cybergear
Address:  2770 St. Albans NW, North Canton, Ohio 44720, USA
Email:    cybergear@delphi.com
Entered:  1995/01/21
Changed:  1995/10/30
Behavior: Posted their ad for t-shirts to at least 30 unrelated
          newsgroups, sometimes changing the subject to avoid
          canceling and to make the postings technically on-topic.
          Did it again on 95/02/05. And again in May.

ID:       BO950212
Name:     Stuart Bar-On, Parallel Performance Group, Meridian Marketing
Address:  450 Jordan Rd., Suite E, Sedona, AZ 86336, USA
Phone:    (520) 282-6300 (voice), (520) 774-0896 (fax)
Email:    ppg@ppgsoft.com, ppginc@shell.portal.com
          ppginc@earth.usa.net, ppg@primenet.com, strand@ppg.strand.com
          ppg@unicomp.net, info@ppginc.com
          ppg@ppgsoft.com, news@ppginc.com
          ppg@infomagic.com
Entered:  1995/02/12
Changed:  1997/03/02
Behavior: Engage in a large-scale ongoing junk e-mail assault.
          Sent out unsolicited e-mail ads to postmasters, who were
          supposed to forward it to their "Marketing Directors". They
          got the addresses from InternNIC's list of registered domain
          names.
          In addition, they gathered e-mail addresses from usenet
          postings and sent unsolicited commercial e-mail to those.
          A new junk e-mail wave occurred around 1995/02/28. This time from
          unicomp.com. I suspect that they scan usenet postings for
          certain Organization-lines in the header.
          They are still at it as of 1996/06/01.
Remarks:  Their mail-bots and WWW pages are maintained by
          zoom.com. In addition, the domain name ppgsoft.com is owned
          by Bar-On but is nothing but a bunch of mailboxes on
          stealth.romoidoy.com.
          The domain ppginc.com, also owned by Bar-On, contains only a
          couple of mail-bots residing on unicomp.net.
          Recently, they have been operating from romoidoy.com and
          quinella.com is also owned by Stuart Bar-On for spam
          purposes. 
          
ID:       CL950228
Name:     Cyberlink Inc. and various agents
Address:  5855 Topanga Canyon Blvd., #520, Woodland Hills, CA 91367, USA
Phone:    818-702-0456 (fax), 216-461-1770 (fax), 216-231-2857 (voice)
          800-266-2006 (voice)
Email:    mvs3@po.CWRU.Edu, MRN@WVNVAXA.WVNET.EDU,
          75017.605@CompuServe.COM, cyberlink@infomat.com,
          fy755@cleveland.Freenet.Edu
Entered:  1995/02/28
Behavior: Persistent, slow spam of soc.culture.* groups, advertising
          some long distance plan. Apparently, Cyberlink pays 
          commissions to agents who brings new customers, and several
          of their agents spam. It's unclear whether Cyberlink is
          aware of that. They need to change their rules.
Remarks:  cyberlink@infomat.com seems to be an automatic mail-back
          robot. 

ID:       WC950415
Name:     WWCD Inc., Steve Schall
Phone:    (410) 581-1110
Email:    wwcd@wwcd.com, t-rock@access.digex.net, steve@wwcd.com
Entered:  1995/04/15  
Behavior: Repeatedly posted announcements of their WWW server on a
          large number of sports related newsgroups. Respond to
          complaints with flames. Put at least 41 links to their
          server on The-Mother-of-all BBS at
          http://wwwmbb.cs.colorado.edu/~mcbryan/bb/summary.html
Remarks:  Access provider is digex.net.

ID:       JS951030       
Name:     Jeff Allen Slaton, a.k.a. SpAmKiNg
Address:  6808 Truchas Drive NE, Albuquerque, NM 87109
Phone:    (505) 821.1945 (fax/data modem)
Email:    Slaton@free.org, JSlaton@free.org
Entered:  1995/10/30
Behavior: Persistent and large scale email and usenet spam. Sometimes
          wants $5 for taking someone off his mailing list. His
          messages usually contain ads for other businesses, but
          sometimes also illegal money making pyramid schemes. Always
          uses fake From lines, sometimes in order to punish past
          access providers. He announced that he would get a T1
          internet connection through MCI in order to annoy them; MCI
          has publicly stated that they won't give access to him. Some
          articles on news.admin.net-abuse.misc criticizing him have
          been canceled by an anonymous party.
Remarks:  A web page containing personal information complete with
          Social Security Number, photo, phone number of his employer,
          and much more is at http://com.primenet.com/spamking/.
          Some more information about where he lives is at
          BL/slaton_personal.txt.
          Please complain to the businesses advertising on his mass
          mailings and boycott them. He is probably connected to the
          net through a SLIP or PPP connection provided by InterRamp;
          they are unresponsive and owned by PSI.
          Contacting the Better Business Bureau about Slaton does not
          make sense since they don't deal with Internet
          cases. However, when it was suggested that the FTC be
          contacted about Slaton's activities, he became *very* pissed
          off. The New Mexico Attorney Genernal is investigating
          Slaton's practices as well.

ID:       PD951030       
Name:     Prime Data WorldNet E!Mail, Computer Enterprises, Vernon Hale
Address:  1132 Richards Rd, Bowling Green, Ky 42104, USA
Phone:    (502)529-9106 (fax), (502)529-9304 (voice)
Email:    worldnet@pwrnet.com,
          cybrcash@ix7.ix.netcom.com, prime@mwci.net
          create@netam.net
Entered:  1995/10/30
Changed:  1996/2/27
Behavior: Send out junk email newsletters with third party ads on
          them. Some people received the newsletter again even after
          having asked to be removed. 
Remarks:  Please complain also to the individual advertisers listed.
          They have already lost an account on mwci.net because of
          complaints. In the past, they have used toc.net to inject
          the messages.  They also maintain accounts on
          valleynet.net. The admins of both valleynet.net and toc.net
          don't see anything wrong with junk email and won't remove his
          account. Has recently (2/96) changed his business strategy
          to selling email spamming software by spamming usenet. 

ID:       IS960227       
Name:     Sunset Direct, Doug Monahan
Address:  9390 Research Blvd.  Kaleido 2 Suite 350, Austin, TX 78759
Phone:    (512) 464-8500
Email:    webmaster@sunsetdirect.com,doug_monahan@mail.sunsetdirect.com,
          doug_monahan@fiddleback.sunsetdirect.com
Entered:  1996/02/28
Behavior: Large scale, repeated, world-wide email spam advertising
          their web site. Email addresses were obtained from usenet
          postings. Mailing lists and usenet groups were hit as
          well. Some of their messages contained fake return
          addresses. 
Remarks:  Please inform the companies working with Sunset Direct (as
          featured on their site http://www.sunsetdirect.com) about
          Sunset Direct's marketing attempts. If they refuse to stop
          sponsoring Sunset Direct, they should be boycotted as
          well. Network connection is provided by netcom.net. A
          publicly posted statement from Dough Monahan is available as
          BL/monahan.txt and an emailed threat is at BL/monahan_threat.txt.
          Apparently, he sends out lots of those. 

ID:       PE960301
Name:     Promo Enterprises a.k.a. Cyber Promotions, Sanford Wallace
Address:  8001 Castor Ave., Suite #127, Philadelphia, PA 19152
          1255 Passmore St, Philadelphia, PA 19111
Phone:    800-650-9110 (phone),  (215) 289-4610 (phone), 800-650-9230 (fax),
          215-288-9230 (fax), 215-743-3750 (fax), 215-288-9110 (phone),
          215-628-9780 (phone)
Email:    wallace@cyberpromo.com
Entered:  1996/03/01
Changed:  1997/09/23
Behavior: Repeatedly sent out unsolicited junk email containing an
          amazing number of scams. Preferably targets online services;
          sometimes uses fake return addresses. The domains
          answerme.com, zapback.com, savetrees.com are also owned by Wallace.
          The matter brought against them by ReplyNet was settled out
          of court.
          Have registered a large number of internet domains
          recently.
          Sometimes they spam by directly telneting to other ISP's
          smtp ports. In the case of concentric.net, they have been
          sued and lost.
          They try to use different servers for different services
          (email, usenet, www, nameserver) so as to make it harder to
          cut them off.
Remarks:  Mr Wallace has made his philosophy clear in a couple of
          articles; read BL/wallace.txt. He
          claims to only send his junk to people who have posted
          commercial ads on the WWW or usenet, which is patently
          false.  A major war is going on between Wallace and AOL; AOL
          blocked all junk from Wallace and Wallace sued. A judge
          ordered the blocking to stop but was overturned. They
          reached an agreement where AOL is allowed to block junk from
          all users who don't specifically request it.
          An Ohio judge in the Compuserve suit against Wallace called
          his junk mailing "trespassing on private property" and
          prohibited it. Updates about this case are at
          http://www.tigerden.com/junkmail/
          Prodigy won a suit against a Wallace banning him from using
          Prodigy to spam.
          The likely main feed provider for Cyberpromo is agis.net,
          which has been unresponsive to complaints and condones email
          spamming. For more information about Cyberpromo and Agis,
          you can visit http://www.cyberpass.net/~fekete/
          Cyberpromo was kicked off agis.net as of 20-Sep-1997.
          In March 1998, Wallace lost a 2 Million Dollar lawsuit and
          decided to leave the spamming business for good.
          Wallace was previously in the junk fax business, until that
          was outlawed.

===Blacklist end===