Joe Padilla's Partner in Crime:
Adam V will be the person who brings down Joe
Stock spammers stung by Secret Service
I've held off on blogging about the reported arrest last week of spammers Adam Vitale (booking photo below) and Todd Moeller until I could get more facts about the case. I've now got some of the details, thanks to a previously sealed deposition of a U.S. Secret Service agent, which includes some juicy excerpts of instant-message conversations involving the two men.
Vitale and Moeller, part of a spam operation known as g00dfellas, have struck me over the years as low-level, blustering spammers, often accused of ripping off their partners -- in other words, they're hardly "spam kings" as others have called them.
But their arrest is still significant. While Moeller (aka trill) and Vitale (aka Batch1 and n1hustler4life) have sent spam for everything from pills to college diplomas, their big money-maker of late has been stock spams -- one of the most vexing types of spam out there right now.
According to the February 17 complaint, Moeller boasted to a fellow spammer (working for the feds as a confidential informant or CI) that he and Vitale were making $40,000 per week sending spam that touted shares of small-cap stocks -- a practice known as pump-and-dump spamming. The two operated a company called Viatelecom aka Via Telecom LLC to do their stock deals.
In an April, 2005 instant message conversation with the CI, Moeller claimed that he had 40 servers for sending spam, as well as 35,000 "peas" or proxies to disguise the true origin of the spams. He said he exclusively spammed AOL members and boasted he could send millions of spams per hour, with less than 20 percent getting caught in AOL's spam filters.
In July of last year, Vitale contacted the CI and offered to hire him as a "mailer" for stocks. According to court documents, Vitale offered to pay the CI $10,000 if he could "make it move" (increase the stock's sales volume).
But it was anti-spyware software spamming that tripped up the two spammers. It all started in April, 2005, when the CI contacted Moeller to try to hire him to send spam for what the feds called "a "purported computer security product" (later referred to as an anti-spyware program).
After months of wrangling over fees and payments, Moeller finally agreed in August to spam for the CI if he was made a full partner, receiving 50% of proceeds. To get the ball rolling, the CI (actually, it was law enforcement agents) wired $1,500 to Moeller in New Jersey. Soon, Moeller began hammering AOL with spams for the anti-spyware product.
At one point, Moeller boasted that his proxies included AOL systems, which enabled him to "proxy lock the [aol] domain and use the internal smtp." However, AOL has told the Secret Service that "most, if not all" of the spams from Moeller/Vitale were sent using Internet IPs and not from AOL's internal network.
Toward the end of August, Vitale contacted the CI, angry that he was paying Moeller, not him. Vitale claimed he was the one doing the mailing, and that Moeller just created fake email headers. "You don't get it do you dum [expletive deleted]?" said Vitale.
Judging from an assortment of online complaints, Vitale has been involved in numerous cases of partners double-crossing each other.
According to the Secret Service, before the sting was over, AOL's filters had registered a total of 1,277,401 spams from Moeller and Vitale. A review of a small portion of the spams showed they had been sent from 73 unique IP addresses (aka proxies).
In spammer forums, there's speculation that the CI was Sean Dunaway, whom you may recall was the Nevada man busted in 2004 for co-conspiring to steal AOL's member database and sell it to other spammers. According to the court docket, Dunaway pled not guilty to defrauding the US in January 2005 and his case is still open.
But spammers have told me that the informant was a spammer who used the online nickname m3rk and who resided in Boca Raton. Perhaps that's Sean Brooks, who identified himself in this online resume as being 22 years old and "extremely good with coding America Online Applications."
No word yet on other members of the g00dfellas gang, who went by aliases including Orlando. But the arrests have certainly shaken up some spammers. When I greeted one spammer online the other night, his first comment was, "skared ... goodfellas went down."