KEY POINTS:
It began with the promise of enhanced sexual performance and, ergo, a rosy future. Such is the world of pharmaceutical spam.
Spam lands daily by the hundreds of millions in in-boxes around the world, despite the best efforts of an industry dedicated to filtering it.
Email users cuss at the cost of trying to keep spam at bay, and at the faceless people who cause them to be sent. But spam exists because enough people respond. Educated people too, as Brian McWilliams, author of Spam Kings, discovered when he managed to access the file directory of a spammer's website. Buyers included doctors and senior businessmen.
One who recently responded to "spamvertising" of Manster, a brand of herbal pills promised to add "intimate inches', was London-based BBC reporter Simon Cox.
Cox clicked on the link in the spam email which took him to the website of Elite Herbal, which proclaimed itself the number one supplier of penis enlargement products. He ordered a bottle of Manster pills, filled in his creditcard details and set about discovering what and whom lay beyond.
The spam email purported to be sent by a woman from a library in Florida. A quick call to the library revealed it was a fake name.
So Cox followed the money. The reporter's Visa payment was processed by servepay.com, a website based in India that was associated with an organisation called Genbucks, which sold herbal products through what it called "affiliates", sales people scattered around the globe.
The suspicion is they are often spammers.
During research for his book, McWilliams posed as an affiliate to find buyers for a man selling fake Rolex watches. "He maintained the website, he was responsible for shipping out the orders," McWilliams told the BBC. McWilliams role was to bring in customers.
"I could do that however I wanted and obviously I did it through spam."
Cox rang a number for Genbucks in Mumbai.
The next step in the BBC's investigation was provided by Henrik Uffe Jensen, a Danish IT consultant whose curiosity about spam prompted him to investigate and record his findings in a blog called Spam In My Inbox. Jensen had been on the trail of Elite Herbal too, and had placed a piece of code in an order he'd sent that enabled him to see the unique internet provider address of the internet user accessing his order.
One of the computers tracking Jensen's order was in New Zealand and its internet service provider was ihug, part of Vodafone New Zealand.
After making inquiries, Vodafone told the BBC it believed the customer was sending spam, although operating behind "a number of other slave or zombie computers".
Inquiries led the BBC to Shane Atkinson of Christchurch but Atkinson denied sending spam. "Well, it's not me, mate," Atkinson told Cox, "We closed all that down a number of years ago ... I'm not controlling any computers."
Atkinson, 36, has not responded to phone and written messages left by the Herald and closed the door when we visited his home.
Atkinson's occupation is listed in the 2005 electoral roll as "pro spammer". He was happy to talk when, in August 2003, Herald technology reporter Juha Saarinen traced spam he had received to Atkinson. "When I rang, Atkinson calmly told me he had been spamming for a year and had no qualms about it," Saarinen reported.
Atkinson also told Saarinen that he and his associates were responsible, on a good day, for sending "up to 100 million" messages and that spamming allowed him to keep a nice car and own a house.
In a later interview, Atkinson said he had given up spamming.
A case involving Atkinson's younger brother, Lance, 25, may indicate the money spammers can make. Lance Atkinson was one of two principals of Australian spam enterprise Global Web Promotions Pty Ltd, prosecuted in 2004 by the United States Federal Trade Commission.
A US District Court judge fined them US$2.2 million ($2.7 million), which he said was what they had made from the spam operation.
Global Web Promotions sold diet patches and human growth hormone. It's HGH products did not contain any human growth hormone, according to papers filed with the court.
The commission yesterday told the Herald it has no record of any of the fine having been paid.
The Herald understands Lance Atkinson lives in Australia but often visits New Zealand.
If Genbucks is involved in spam, how significant is it? How many cells of spammers are marketing Elite Herbal which also goes by the name Herbal King is uncertain, but according to those who monitor spam, Elite Herbal is one of the biggest names in spam.
Spam-monitoring organisation Spamhaus rates it number eight in all types of spam and by far the biggest in pharmaceutical spam.
Journalists and cheesed-off IT experts were not the only ones investigating the Elite Herbal spammers. New Zealand's newly formed Anti-Spam Compliance Unit (part of the Department of Internal Affairs), in collaboration with international agencies, had been gathering evidence "for two months when a BBC news report alerted the business to the investigation", said DIA deputy secretary Keith Manch.
"We had to move quickly to capture evidence supporting the spamming allegations ... "
On December 17 four days after the report aired search warrants were executed simultaneously on four Christchurch addresses and investigators seized 22 computer systems and a substantial number of paper documents.
Two businessmen were interviewed at Christchurch police station by anti-spam investigators.
The Herald understands that Shane Atkinson was one of those interviewed and that his home and the office of his company, Etech Media, were among addresses raided.
According to its website, services offered by Etech Media include website design, programming, hosting and internet marketing.
Some of its marketing is associated with Genbucks.
Genbucks-related sites with links to Etech Media include a New Zealand dating site that advertised a product called Spermomax and another that offered online sales of party pills.
So who owns Genbucks? According to a Genbucks affiliate blogging on the Genbucks site, it is owned by Shane Atkinson and an Indian resident. The affiliate included a photograph of himself dining with the owners.
According to its website, Genbucks is an affiliate marketing system selling anything from penis pills to satin sheets. It claims to pay more than $1 million monthly to its affiliates.
Shane Atkinson appears to be doing well. A search of property registers indicates that since he spoke to the Herald in 2003, Atkinson has built a large home (ratings valuation $662,000) and bought four apartments for between $223,000 and $343,000.
He drives a 2006 Toyota Hilux which Etech Media bought new. Atkinson is the sole shareholder and director of Etech.
Examining whether Atkinson's business has breached the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act is being assessed by DIA investigators. Penalties under the act range up to $500,000, plus damages. The warrants executed in December were the first issued under the act, which took effect in September.
A decision on any further action was likely months away, DIA's anti-spam manager Joe Stewart told the Herald. Each computer system held the equivalent of 1600 full two-gigabyte memory sticks. That data had to be analysed, cross-referenced and brought to a form "that is understandable to and acceptable in court".
Meantime, the BBC's Simon Cox has received a brown envelope containing Manster pills (more recently marketed as VPXL). They came with the promise of enhanced sexual performance but no mention of penis enlargement.
He sent it to the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington DC, which reported it was unable to find any evidence that the ingredients it examined would have any effect. They also informed Cox that what he paid US$70 for could be bought in India for US$1.
The DIA asks anyone who has bought a pharmaceutical product as a result of an unsolicited electronic message to contact info@antispam.govt.nz.
