Prince of Porn Crowned King of Spammers
From The Miami Herald: Eddy Marin's a pathetic little guy I met three years ago in a deserted porn warehouse in Pompano Beach, a hustler trying to persuade me that he had a great Internet business he was trying to sell before he went off to jail on money laundering charges.
Now, the BBC told me, Eddy's working out of Boca Raton and has been identified as ''king of the spammers'' by the London-based anti-spam detective group Spamhaus. This is a guy you'd love to hate, the kind of fellow who clogs your Inbox each time you sign on. Spamhaus says Eddy may put out 50 million e-mails a day.
He is part of what The Observer in London calls the ''Boca Raton Spam Gang,'' which is said to churn out 250 million e-mails a day. Another British paper, The Evening Standard, said most messages focused on the ''cheap Viagra, big penis'' genre.
When I met Eddy, he was just beginning his ''marketing'' career, though I didn't realize it at the time.
I was researching a story on cyberporn, which back in 2000 was considered one of the few sectors making money on the Web. Eddy, who had done jail time for cocaine trafficking, agreed to talk to me because he wanted publicity to help sell his businesses, which included Internet Video Group and its websites, such as DoMe Live.com. (Note to leches: Don't bother searching for the site -- it no longer functions.)
The Pompano operation had a 22,000-square-foot ''cyberbroadcast'' facility that included six small studios. Each studio was designed to contain a bed, a webcam and a woman.
The idea was that a viewer visited the site, gave his credit card information and was assigned to a room, where a young lady -- generally a former lap dancer -- was sprawled on a bed.
The viewer typed in a request -- ''scratch your back'' -- and the woman scratched her back. You get the picture.
At its peak, 40 women were said to work at the warehouse in shifts around the clock. The average viewer spent $100 on a session. By the time Eddy took over, however, cyberporn was changing. Amateurs -- women working out of their homes with webcams -- had grabbed much of the market, and the big porn operators found that they could get cheaper product by filming Eastern European prostitutes in Amsterdam.
Eddy told me he had shrunk the firm down to four employees and changed the business model, so that he was primarily servicing other websites -- porn and nonporn -- by developing sites, hosting them on servers and doing their ``marketing.'' He boasted that he brought in $750,000 during the first quarter of 2000 -- ``over 80 percent profit.''
His new name for the firm was ''Opt-In Services,'' the same name he's using today. He was beginning to focus, he said, on marketing data bases and ``opt-in mailings.''
''Opt-in'' means you have asked for the e-mail, such as a buyer of a Dell computer requesting notices about new products. Spam, of course, is not opt-in, but groups like Spamhaus allege that many spammers use the term to dignify their work.
''What Eddy is doing is groundbreaking and cutting edge,'' one guy in the porn industry told me three years ago. Example: One of Eddy's marketing techniques was to offer a free photo -- you can guess what type -- just for providing your e-mail address. No credit card necessary. What would be wrong with that? Of course, now we can see that Eddy was gathering e-mail addresses for future ``marketing campaigns.''
As I was working on the cyberporn story, someone sent an anonymous e-mail to The Herald warning that, though Eddy was claiming to have become a legitimate Web-based business, his ``primary source of income is reportedly from sending spam . . . promoting porn sites.''
At the time, I was interested in the porn, not Eddy's ''marketing,'' and I didn't put that warning in the story. But this month, after hearing from the BBC, I did some checking. It turns out Eddy's been active in many areas. Last year, when the huge Atlanta credit-reporting company Equifax bought e-marketeer Naviant of Boca Raton, it found that some of Eddy's firms were dealing with a Naviant subsidiary.
That relationship quickly ended, Equifax told me in an e-mail: ``Equifax absolutely does not believe in nor engage in spam of any kind.''
I called Eddy at his Boca office to ask what he felt about being the king of spam. The woman who answered the phone snickered nervously and said someone would get back to me.
I gave her my phone number -- but not my e-mail address.
http://www.therealgeneross.com/
