Willamette Week| Lead Story: The War on Spam

Jason Heckel is a home-grown Oregonian. The 24-year-old Salem resident is clean-cut and deferent and blushes easily. He's more Jay Jacobs than Nordstorm, and his broad torso and tree-trunk legs are evidence of regular workouts. He's the coach and shortstop for his health club's softball team, and his father says he's a good boy.

Others, however, say he is a low-life bottom feeder. A greedy, sneaking charlatan who uses stealth tactics to sell blarney to the gullible, the desperate and the vulnerable.

Even worse, his critics say, he practices his craft on the Internet, infecting what many see as a utopian forum of free expression.

Heckel is a spammer, they say, one of thousands of entrepreneurs who send unsolicited commercial e-mail selling everything from natural cures for brain cancer to the "150 Sexiest Girls on the Internet." Because it's cheap and easy, bulk e-mailing is available to anyone, and it's become a tool for low-rent marketers. In a spam, no claim is too outrageous, no promise too fantastic.

On Oct. 22, the state of Washington filed a lawsuit--the first of its kind. In King County court, the attorney general's office sued Heckel, charging him with three counts of e-mail fraud. If found guilty, Heckel could conceivably be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars--and become the country's first victim of an anti-spam backlash that has moved from the whinings of computer geeks to the hammer of regulators.

Heckel didn't set out to be the wired world's public enemy number one. He just wanted to make a few bucks.

Six years ago, the former baseball and football standout at South Salem High School had plans to go to Portland State University. He didn't have the grades, however, so he went to Chemeketa Community College and lived with his parents.

While at school, Heckel bagged groceries. That experience was enough to show him that he didn't want to work for anyone else.

"It was really hard for me to go to a job and hit a time clock and get paid an hourly wage and have to deal with all that stuff," he says. "I really saw myself not doing that."

In 1993, he heard about Equinox, a multi-level marketing company that distributes a line of health and body products and holds seminars around the country. It's been described as similar to Amway, with less Christianity and more sex appeal.

"Some people thought Equinox was cultish," Heckel says, "but I learned a lot about how to present yourself and how people relate to each other."

He signed up with the company. Within a few years, he claims, he was overseeing $20,000 to $30,000 a month in sales and had 200 to 250 people working under him. And he wasn't even working full-time, he says.

For reasons he won't go into, he left Equinox in 1996 and struck out on his own.

Around that time, Heckel's father, who is nearing retirement after 30 years at the State Department of Transportation, brought home a personal computer. Heckel wasn't interested in it at first, until he saw an ad on television for America Online and asked his parents if he could sign up.

Initially, his mother said no. She didn't know what was out there on the Internet and was afraid of what he would find.

He finally convinced her and got an AOL account. He says he signed up to look for companionship, and with the screen name ILovetoGiveRoses@aol.com, he soon found it. His new girlfriend, Shelley Bartram, was charmed by the name one night as she surfed AOL from Western Oregon State College, where she was an accounting student. She sent him a message, and they've been together ever since.

The computer had a profound effect on Heckel's social life, but it affected his business life even more.

Because of the lawsuit, he has been advised by his attorney against speaking about his computer marketing efforts.

According to the suit, however, since at least February of 1996, Heckel began sending unsolicited commercial e-mails over the Internet. In 1997, he developed a 46-page booklet titled "How to Profit from the Internet" and sent e-mails pushing the booklet worldwide. In one e-mail that the attorney general is using as Exhibit A, the pitch, in excited hyperbole, says that secrets to the Internet can be had for not $249.95, not $199.95, not even $99.95, but for a mere $39.95, including bonuses worth more than $500. The message also cites a number of vague testimonies from people who bought the booklet and made a mint.

Using a software program called Extractor Pro that mines e-mail addresses from the Internet and automatically sends spam to them, Heckel sent between 100,000 and 1 million advertisements for his booklet every week, the suit claims. If he sold approximately 40 packages a month, as the suit claims, Heckel was taking in about $1,600 monthly--hardly a fortune and somewhat of an irony given that his booklet promised unlimited riches for little effort.

To Heckel, and other spammers like him, the Internet is a cyberland of opportunity, a place where the clever and hard-working can grab a piece of the American dream.

Murphy, who lives in Vancouver, Wash., says that his principal concern with spam is the cost shifting.

"If I came up to you in the supermarket and grabbed a couple bucks out of your purse, and you knew it was going to happen every time you went to the market," he says, "what would you think?"

Bulk e-mailing is very inexpensive for the sender. All you need is a basic computer and a connection to the Internet. There are none of the printing or postage costs associated with direct mail, and unlike telemarketing, there is no staff to maintain.

Industry estimates suggest tens of millions of dollars are spent dealing with unwanted bulk e-mails every year. These costs are passed on to the end user, who spends time online checking e-mail. For people who pay for Internet access by the minute, downloading and deleting spam is a waste of money.

The other cost comes from Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Teleport, the largest ISP in Oregon, receives about 200 spam complaints from its customers every day, and a Teleport representative follows up on every one of them, tracking down the source and reporting the person or organization to the ISP that hosted the mailing. The cost of this process adds up not only for Teleport but for everyone. It's been estimated that $2 out of an average monthly Internet bill goes toward fighting spam.

Murphy follows up on each spam he receives, and after he decodes the header, which shows the route the e-mail took, he sends an e-mail reporting the offender to the service provider. Most Internet service providers have user guidelines that call for the cancellation of a spammer's account.

Tracking the source can take an hour per spam, but to Murphy, it's worth it. In his mind, spam is robbery. "I'm paying to receive every single one of them," Murphy says. "I don't want to pay criminals."

To many, spam's real cost has nothing to do with dollars; it has to do with invasion of privacy. In fact, a number of groups have formed in recent years to battle spam. Activist groups such as Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (CAUCE) and Junkbusters have become centers for spam control, advising e-mail users how to keep from getting spammed and what to do when it happens. News groups--which are particularly vulnerable to getting clogged with spam--are filled with venomous postings from Internet users who rail against spammers. Sometimes the battles are heated, with spammers posting to defend their practices and the anti-spammers threatening to run them off the Internet.

The CAUCE has a Web site that provides this manifesto: "Your e-mail address is not the public domain! It is yours, you paid for it, and you should have control over what it is used for."

While Netizens everywhere agree that spam is a problem, there is little consensus over what to do to fix it. Articles have appeared in publications from The New York Times to Wired magazine. The Heckel lawsuit has turned up the heat. Last month, an article about the suit in the online magazine Salon showed just how complicated the issue is. As much as spammers are hated, no one really knows how to control them.

Some argue that technology can fight technology. There are filter programs that ISPs can run to block certain e-mail addresses, domain names or common subject words. Also, many software programs can automatically sort and label e-mail as "junk" or "bulk."

Still, given that Teleport has three employees working a total of 20 hours a week manually following up on spam, it's clear that technology isn't yet able to completely stop the problem.

For his part, Murphy scoffs at technological fixes. "There has never been a lock invented that can't be picked," he says.

Last year, Congress looked into making all spam illegal but, after lobbying efforts from groups like the Direct Marketing Association, it changed its plan. The revised bill simply stated that unsolicited commercial e-mail must meet certain disclosure requirements, but it was never passed.

It seems no one can really decide how to regulate spam. Both California and Nevada have passed anti-spam laws this year. California's requires all commercial e-mail to have the tag "ADV" in the subject line so it can easily be filtered out by ISPs.

Initially, the attorney general in Washington also sought to make all spam illegal. After pressure from free-speech groups and computer companies--most notably, Microsoft--the legislature passed a bill that focused on the fraud that often comes with spam. Since last June, it has been illegal to send a fraudulent e-mail to a Washington resident.

Paula Selis, the senior counsel for consumer affairs of the attorney general's office, says that since the law was passed she has received thousands of complaints from people who have received spam.

Selis says the state sent Heckel a warning to stop sending spam to Washington, but he did not. They charge that Heckel committed three illegal acts with his mailings.

Second, he gave no means for a recipient to reply to him. To order the advertised product, people had to print out the e-mail and mail a check or credit-card number to a third-party address in Salem. The e-mail address listed in the "sender" field was bogus, so people who sent him complaints received nothing back but a bounced e-mail--returned to them as undeliverable.

Third, he used a deceptive subject line. The subject line is what shows up on the screen to tell recipients what the e-mail is about. One subject line Heckel used was "Do I have the right address?" This misled people into opening the e-mail, thinking it was perhaps from a long-lost friend.

The fine for breaking Washington state law is up to $2,000 per e-mail. At this point, it isn't known how large Heckel's total fine could be because the number of e-mails he sent across the border has not been determined. The trial is scheduled for the year 2000.

According to The Seattle Times, following the arrest, Heckel said, "They [the Washington state attorney general] bent me over.... They entrapped me." Last week he defended unsolicited commercial e-mail, saying he reads all that he gets. "You never know what could be in there," he told WW.

Bulk e-mailing isn't likely to go away. In fact, it's the future of marketing. Already, business-to-business e-mail marketing has been very successful, according to Zhet Dalzell, spokesman for the Direct Marketing Association. That kind of commercial e-mailing will eventually trickle down to the consumer, and people will get more comfortable with it in the same way they've grown used to sending their credit cards numbers over the Internet. Dalzell also says that while guidelines should be developed for unsolicited commercial e-mail to prevent fraud, these types of mailings shouldn't be stemmed on principal.

"Every recipient has a different definition for what they consider spam," he says. "One person's junk is another person's treasure."

While the lawyers prepare their cases, Heckel and his family wait it out. Heckel still has a Web site up that promotes his booklet, but he isn't sending any bulk e-mails. Jason's father is worried that his son won't be able to defend himself against the legal power of an entire state. "He's a good boy," his father says. "He works hard. Now he has no means to support himself."

Last week, in his attorney's office in Salem--with his girlfriend, two attorneys and his father present--Heckel seemed slightly overwhelmed by what had befallen him. But he seemed to relish the chance to tell what little of his story he was permitted.

It seems, after all, his mother was right: You can't be too sure what you'll find on the Internet.

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Willamette Week | originally published November 11, 1998