Missouri Mule
01-30-2004, 12:16 PM
All you ever wanted to know about "Spam" and then some. Long but interesting.
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Mr. Spam Man
Microsoft wants to shut him down. New York's attorney general wants to see him in court. But Scott Richter keeps thinking big.
BY ALAN PRENDERGAST
alan.prendergast@westword.com
From the week of January 29, 2004
FWD: SCOTT, DON'T SUFFER BETWEEN PAYCHECKS! THINK BIG!
In Scott Richter's world, size matters.
Richter knows that Americans like things big. Bigger penis, bigger breasts. Big savings. Big chance to win big. Think big about the bigness people crave, and big profits could be yours.
Richter is a big fellow himself, 240 pounds or so packed on a 6' 1" frame. He used to be bigger, before he got into big-time weight loss. But these days, it's his business that's really big. His e-mail marketing company, OptInRealBig, controls a host of like-minded domain names, including SaveRealBig, RealBigCash, RealGreatGifts, RealBigHosting and LesbiansSizzle.com (lesbians, God knows, are big). At 32, Richter's already spent nearly two decades chasing the Next Big Thing -- and finding it, the past few years, in cyberspace.
Last April, as American forces marched into Baghdad, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks showed a group of reporters a mock-up of playing cards featuring the faces of Iraqi leaders sought for questioning. Right away, Richter knew this was going to be big, big, big.
The Pentagon had developed the cards as an intelligence tool, to be distributed to the troops. Richter saw them as the war souvenir the public had been waiting for. Within hours, his company was shooting out e-mails advertising the cards for sale -- more than 15 million e-mails, in fact. Richter moved 40,000 decks of the cards in a week, buying them for 89 cents each and selling them for $5.95. Yet at the time he started the blitz, he didn't have a single deck in stock. Nobody did.
"We sold them before we ever owned them," he recalls. "Wal-Mart would've taken three weeks to get them in. We knew we could find them, so we went to work."
Richter tells the story while bottle-feeding one of his five-month-old twin sons in the kitchen of his Westminster home. It's a clean, spacious, well-lit place, with a portrait of Marilyn Monroe in the foyer, three Rhodesian Ridgebacks cavorting on the back deck, and hockey trophies and a pair of giant flat-screen monitors towering over the desk in the den. It's the kind of house you'd expect a young, sober, hard-driving entrepreneur to inhabit with his young, budding family. It's also totally at odds with Richter's reputation among his enemies on the Internet, who regard him as one of the most notorious and "morally challenged" spammers in the world...
(SNIP)
http://westword.com/issues/current/feature.html/1/index.html
=====================
Mr. Spam Man
Microsoft wants to shut him down. New York's attorney general wants to see him in court. But Scott Richter keeps thinking big.
BY ALAN PRENDERGAST
alan.prendergast@westword.com
From the week of January 29, 2004
FWD: SCOTT, DON'T SUFFER BETWEEN PAYCHECKS! THINK BIG!
In Scott Richter's world, size matters.
Richter knows that Americans like things big. Bigger penis, bigger breasts. Big savings. Big chance to win big. Think big about the bigness people crave, and big profits could be yours.
Richter is a big fellow himself, 240 pounds or so packed on a 6' 1" frame. He used to be bigger, before he got into big-time weight loss. But these days, it's his business that's really big. His e-mail marketing company, OptInRealBig, controls a host of like-minded domain names, including SaveRealBig, RealBigCash, RealGreatGifts, RealBigHosting and LesbiansSizzle.com (lesbians, God knows, are big). At 32, Richter's already spent nearly two decades chasing the Next Big Thing -- and finding it, the past few years, in cyberspace.
Last April, as American forces marched into Baghdad, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks showed a group of reporters a mock-up of playing cards featuring the faces of Iraqi leaders sought for questioning. Right away, Richter knew this was going to be big, big, big.
The Pentagon had developed the cards as an intelligence tool, to be distributed to the troops. Richter saw them as the war souvenir the public had been waiting for. Within hours, his company was shooting out e-mails advertising the cards for sale -- more than 15 million e-mails, in fact. Richter moved 40,000 decks of the cards in a week, buying them for 89 cents each and selling them for $5.95. Yet at the time he started the blitz, he didn't have a single deck in stock. Nobody did.
"We sold them before we ever owned them," he recalls. "Wal-Mart would've taken three weeks to get them in. We knew we could find them, so we went to work."
Richter tells the story while bottle-feeding one of his five-month-old twin sons in the kitchen of his Westminster home. It's a clean, spacious, well-lit place, with a portrait of Marilyn Monroe in the foyer, three Rhodesian Ridgebacks cavorting on the back deck, and hockey trophies and a pair of giant flat-screen monitors towering over the desk in the den. It's the kind of house you'd expect a young, sober, hard-driving entrepreneur to inhabit with his young, budding family. It's also totally at odds with Richter's reputation among his enemies on the Internet, who regard him as one of the most notorious and "morally challenged" spammers in the world...
(SNIP)
http://westword.com/issues/current/feature.html/1/index.html