Yummy: Spammer on Toast!

June 7, 2000 3:50 PM

Yummy: Spammer on Toast! Forget Microsoft. I'm more excited about the breakup of Rodona Garst's spamming business. Her ICQ message logs, legally incriminating personal files and bare-ass photo are all over the Web today.
posted by rcade (8 comments total)

The discussion about this at Slashdot provides some context for this site. The general consensus is that the whole thing is bogus. Which is also my opinion.
posted by y6y6y6 at 4:01 PM on June 7, 2000

After reading around 30 pages on the site, I think it's legitimate -- there's an amazing depth of detail to the files. Just to pick one example of many, there are ICQ logs in which Garst discusses sending spam as part of a stock market pump-and-dump scheme with a client named Mark Rice. Two months after the date in the ICQ logs, Yahoo shows that Mark Rice sold 50,000 shares of the stock involved and made more than $468,000.
posted by rcade at 4:14 PM on June 7, 2000

Heck with her bare-ass photo; you can see her tits.

God only knows where this picture came from...

By the way, I have received my own self some of the purported stock pump-and-dump messages. Those were not made up, those really did get distributed. When I receive messages like that, I always forward them to the SEC -- you never know, it might help.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 5:58 PM on June 7, 2000

wow, what a great bedtime story. Thanks for dropping it by, rcade. Thats good reading (now if I can only get the "tits" image out of my head). Real or not, I don't know, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
posted by jamescblack at 7:50 PM on June 7, 2000

I think it's real, I know two people on the "banned" spam list (meaning they complain too much to the right people, so the spam company doesn't ever send them mail)
posted by mathowie at 10:46 PM on June 7, 2000

An old address of mine was on the anti-spam list, but none of the current ones, dammit.

I am a little worried if it is just a massive case of harrassment against an innocent person. But having read the whole site, I too think it's likely to be true. The ICQ files are really lengthy and really mundane, for the most part -- not the kind of thing someone would make up.
posted by litlnemo at 1:46 AM on June 8, 2000

Well, between here, a dozen weblogs, and cruel.com the guy got the publicity he deserves for putting all of this together. I've been on his end of spam and relay attacks more than once, I can sympathize.
posted by Dean_Paxton at 4:01 AM on June 8, 2000

Re: the veracity of the endeavour. Everyone likes to chime in with "ha! you're not fooling me!"... but I believe there's simply too much supporting evidence here to ignore. And there's no way anyone could have invented those reams of logs.

However the "hacking" story does sound dubious. I agree with the /. poster who suggested it could have been put up by an ex-employee.

posted by BobInce at 5:15 AM on June 8, 2000