Spam Kings (10 page)

Just as Hoffmann was launching her Empire Towers page in April 2001, an anti-spammer who
called himself Rob Mitchell was putting the crowning touches on a spammer-tracking web site
he had been building for three years.

Mitchell was also considered obsessive by some Nanae participants for his painstaking
research into the subject of his site: a chronic spammer who used the online nickname "Terri
DiSisto" and claimed to be a female college student in Massachusetts.

Unlike most junk emailers, DiSisto wasn't littering the Internet in hopes of selling
something. Instead, her ads offered payment in the form of cash and computer or audio
equipment to young men between eighteen and twenty-three who mailed her videos of themselves
being tickled.

DiSisto's bizarre story began around 1996, when she started spamming obscure newsgroups
including alt.sex.fetish.tickling with her ads. "No sex or nudity are ever wanted in my
videos," stated the spams. "I just want to see guys tied up and mercilessly, relentlessly
TICKLED!" DiSisto claimed she enjoyed tickling as a hobby and was not interested in
real-life encounters with her video subjects.

"I have a boyfriend, full cadre of friends, and plenty of guys to tickle already. I AM
NOT LOOKING TO MEET OR TICKLE ANY GUYS ENCOUNTERED FROM CYBERSPACE!" stated the ads.
College-aged men who stepped up to the offer were told to send the finished products to post
office boxes in New York or Massachusetts and were given elaborate instructions on how to
produce the videos.

"When laughter begins, the tickler must ask the question, 'How ticklish are you here?'"
explained DiSisto's instructions. "The tickled guy—while still being tickled—must respond in
as much of a complete sentence or sentences as possible (e.g., avoiding responses like
'very' or 'not too much' in favor of 'I'm totally ticklish under my arms...'). No one- or
two-word answers."

DiSisto also detailed her offer, as well as excerpts from videos and audiotapes she had
received, at her web site, tickling.com. The site featured a photograph of an attractive
young blonde woman, purportedly DiSisto, in an over-the-shoulder, yearbook pose.

In a misguided effort at target marketing, DiSisto began repeatedly posting her ads in
newsgroups frequented by young men, such as rec.sports.paintball and rec.music.phish, a
discussion board for fans of the rock group Phish. To avoid complaints that her messages
were off topic and inappropriate, DiSisto posted offers of free tickets to Phish concerts in
New York City to qualified young men who sent her videos.

But participants nonetheless began to complain about DiSisto's flagrant violation of
newsgroup etiquette. As the complaints piled up, anti-spammer Morely Dotes declared a Usenet
Death Penalty against DiSisto in 1997, which meant that newsgroup administrators all over
the Internet would immediately cancel any of her postings to Usenet.

Consumed by a belief that she had a right to act out her fetish anywhere in cyberspace,
DiSisto began to fight back.

First, she started indiscriminately spamming her ads to email users all over the
Internet. Then she dropped "binary bombs
"—encoded messages designed to flood and disrupt a discussion group—on
rec.music.phish and other forums where regulars had told her she was unwelcome. DiSisto also
retaliated directly against individuals who griped about her tickling ads, deluging them
with thousands of emails over the course of a few hours. She similarly used email bombs to
take revenge on people who had second thoughts after agreeing to make videos for her.

When a Massachusetts high school student named Sean Gallagher stopped sending her videos
after he graduated and went off to college, DiSisto bombed his personal email account and
that of Gallagher's friend, who was attending Suffolk University in Boston. DiSisto
similarly bombed the email account of Suffolk administrators, forging the messages so they
appeared to come from Gallagher's friend. The attacks completely disabled Suffolk's email
system on three occasions. Similar retaliatory bombings knocked out the mail servers of at
least two other universities.

Rob Mitchell was dragged into the bizarre world of "Terri Tickle" in early October of
1998. Thirty-nine at the time and a public school teacher in Huntsville, Texas, Mitchell had
heard about DiSisto's spamming and email bombings on a web-based message board. In a posting
on his own board, which Mitchell had created for discussions of humorous fiction, Mitchell
criticized DiSisto for harassing people who had no interest in providing her videos.

Somehow, DiSisto learned about Mitchell's comments and decided to retaliate. She sent
thousands of spams with the subject line, "A message board for TICKLISH GAY GUYS." The body
of the messages invited recipients who "would enjoy conversing and sharing
stories/experiences involving tickling" to visit a web address—Mitchell's—listed in the
spam.

Within an hour, complaints began appearing on Mitchell's board from people livid over
receiving the spam. In the course of an afternoon, people posted over 200 angry comments.
Meanwhile, reports about the spam were appearing on several Usenet newsgroups, including
alt.kill.spammers. The next day, when Mitchell tried to access his board, he learned that
the ISP hosting the service had terminated his account.

That was when Mitchell became DiSisto's most formidable opponent and an ardent
anti-spammer.

Over the course of nearly three years, Mitchell tussled with DiSisto in newsgroups and
eventually over IRC chats and emails. As he tried to warn Internet users about the dangers
of getting involved in DiSisto's fetish, she publicly accused him of being gay and being
jealous of her video collection. All the while, Mitchell was compiling evidence of her
spamming and other Internet abuses. He studied every DiSisto email message header he could
get his hands on and determined that she used accounts with at least sixteen different ISPs
to send her ads and her mail bombs.

Mitchell posted his findings to Nanae and other groups under the title "Terri DiSisto: a
History in URLs." Yet his initial reception in Nanae was decidedly hostile. Many
anti-spammers considered both DiSisto and Mitchell kooks cut from the same cloth.

"Why don't you just marry her or shoot her or do something else reasonable?" suggested a
veteran anti-spammer who used the online nickname Rebecca Ore. "Really, we know she's bad.
Just some of us think there are spammers who are several orders of magnitude worse," Ore
added.

Mitchell realized that DiSisto was a relatively small-time spammer who bulked out
messages by the tens of thousands, not by the millions like some of the big players. But her
crimes went well beyond spamming and made her, in his opinion, one of the worst individual
abusers of the Internet.

But that argument mostly fell on deaf ears in Nanae. Even Steve Atkins, a veteran spam
fighter and creator of the SamSpade.org
site, which Mitchell relied on to analyze and track DiSisto's spams, dismissed
his explanation: "Bollocks...You just have a thing about tickling."

Eventually DiSisto began visiting Nanae and became a regular participant. She alternated
between trying to engage anti-spammers in rational discussions about her online behavior and
taunting them with S.S.
Titanic
-derived metaphors about their inability
to get her web site disconnected for more than a few days at a time.

"Tickling.com remains, I assure you, UNSINKABLE," DiSisto bragged in a January 2000
posting to Nanae. "But like any great ship," she added, "there can be periodic difficulties
in the engine room."

Shortly afterwards, DiSisto announced that she had located two television production
firms in California that were making the videos she wanted. As a result, she claimed she no
longer would advertise for tickling videos via email or Usenet spam.

"There is NO NEED to look for guys randomly out here in cyberspace. I haven't done it in
months. I don't intend to do it anytime soon. I think my disappearance from the spam scene
deserves notice," she wrote.

If DiSisto believed the public announcement of her retirement from spamming would
somehow erase her past, she was wrong. In fact, her Internet notoriety had already caught
the attention of
Reader's Digest
magazine, which planned to include her
in a forthcoming article about online harassment. Hal Karp, a reporter for the magazine,
contacted Mitchell that January after encountering his "History in URLs" postings to
Nanae.

Karp said the story would focus on a group called Cyber Angels
, which had assisted one of DiSisto's mail-bombing victims. As Mitchell traded
notes with Karp, he sensed the reporter was sitting on information that would blow the
DiSisto case wide open. But Karp was keeping his cards close to the vest, and at one point
he even said he had to be careful so as not to jeopardize an investigation by law
enforcement.

When the April 2000 issue of
Reader's Digest
was published, Karp's
article didn't cite Mitchell or his Nanae postings. Nor did it mention tickling.com or the
surname DiSisto, referring instead only to "a woman named Terri." According to the article,
the woman cyber-stalked a young Internet user, pseudonymously named Gary, hoping to get him
to sell her a video of himself bound and tickled. When Gary refused, she bombed him with
over 30,000 emails. Then, one night as Gary was discussing his situation in a chat room,
someone claiming to be a Cyber Angel offered to help him track and research his
stalker.

"The hunter was now the hunted," wrote Karp, who reported that the anonymous Cyber Angel
helped Gary uncover some shocking information. According to the article, "he learned that
Terri was not a female college student, but a man...One night Gary tracked Terri online and
revealed what he knew. The harassment screeched to a halt."

The article left Mitchell stunned. All along, he had occasionally wondered about
DiSisto's gender, but how was Gary able so quickly to dig up information that Mitchell and
others had failed to find over several years?

While unsatisfying to Mitchell, the article gave him hope that DiSisto was about to be
publicly unmasked. Surely if Gary knew her real identity, it would just be a matter of time
before federal authorities would act on the information. To assist in that process, Mitchell
gathered up his "History in URLs" pages from Nanae and published them at a web page he
created, which he entitled "Project Iceberg."

What Karp hadn't revealed in his article was that DiSisto's victim Gary had provided the
reporter with an archive of electronic files apparently stolen from DiSisto's computer by a
hacker in late 1999. The files included a trove of incriminating data such as a resumé
bearing DiSisto's true name and address, a file containing her social security number, and
correspondence and other personal documents. Also contained in the archive was a newsgroup
posting Mitchell had made with instructions on how to report DiSisto for spamming.

Karp hadn't disclosed the information, or how he obtained it, primarily because of the
liability concerns of the magazine's lawyers. But he handed over the files, as well as a
pile of other evidence he had dug up on DiSisto, to the FBI shortly after his article was
published.

Meanwhile, DiSisto tried in public to spin the
Reader's Digest
article as a work of fiction aimed at entertaining readers.

"I think you'll find the overall impact of the article rather disappointing," she told
Nanae participants.

But clearly the piece had staggered DiSisto. Soon after it appeared she stopped posting
to Nanae and retreated instead to newsgroups devoted to tickling, including one she had
created herself, alt.multimedia.tk.terri-disisto.

Mitchell was ready to move on. He turned his attention to spamware vendor Andrew
Brunner, on whom he composed a series of Nanae postings familiarly entitled "Andrew Brunner:
A History in URLs." The articles documented the combative Brunner's online machinations
since 1998. For his efforts, Shiksaa offered Mitchell a new email address using her domain:
[email protected]
.

But Mitchell had not heard the last from "Terri Tickle."