CDR: beOutdoors spam scam exposed

[Michelle]

I know the beOutdoors spamming incedent is an old
issue, but I thought you might be interested in
reading this message I posted on n.a.n.e. Also, I got
the original lie they told mixed up, but please note
that no one was fired as a result. (The original
beOutdoors lie is at the bottom as a refresher.)


> Hello!
> 
> Boy are you going to be glad that you are reading
> this. I used to work at beOutdoors.com until very
> recently.
> 
> I know the real story about what happened with that
> whole spamming incident.
> 
> There was never a young IT guy who was fired and
> broke
> into the building and spammed a bunch of people, but
> I
> think you already knew that.
> 
> Karla Story is the Director of Business Development,
> but more importantly,  she is the best friend of the
> wife of Randy Hoffman, President of beOutdoors.com
> and
> former Republican candidate for the U.S. House of
> Represenstatives. Karla purchased a CD containing 30
> million names and email addresses for $110 for the
> express purpose of spamming them. Apparently, it
> seemed like a viable advertising campaign at the
> time.
> 
> Geng (James) Qu, formerly of KPMG, now Director of
> IT
> at beOutdoors.com, wrote a program for Randy that
> would automatically send a mass email to batches of
> about 25,000 addresses at a time. They specifically
> pulled out AOL addresses since they were a Gold
> Anchor
> tenant in AOL Shopping.
> 
> Randy would come into the back room (Oh, I forgot to
> mention that at the time they were located in a
> strip
> mall and 14 people worked there - so much for their
> "very secure location". Also, some of the servers
> were
> down in the LA area at a place where there is no way
> in hell this would happen.) and say, "Let's run off
> the next 25,000." The rest of us knew they were
> doing
> a big mailing, but we thought that they were sending
> things only to registered users. Besides, the
> Director
> of IT was our entire IT department at the time.
> 
> Later when James noticed that we were getting a lot
> of
> bounce backs, he attributed it to server problems.
> Another employee showed him the thread (yours)
> regarding this spamming incident.
> 
> James had no idea that Randy had put out that bogus
> story about a break-in. Right away he knew that it
> would come back to haunt them. As I mentioned, they
> had no IT people other than the Director of IT.
> Also,
> the only person who had been fired prior to that was
> a
> graphics person, and it hadn't been a recent firing.
> 
> I know that this is an old issue, but as you are the
> self-proclaimed blight upon all spammers, or
> something
> similar, I thought that you might still be
> interested.
> 
> By the way, just so that you don't think I am a
> disgruntled employee who is making this up, I wasn't
> fired. I gave them a full two weeks notice like a
> good
> employee would.
> 
> However, if you are interested in hearing many more
> examples of the lack of integrity at beOutdoors.com,
> I
> would be more than happy to oblige. I never signed a
> non-disclosure agreement.
> 
> Enjoy!


>From Exodus:

We have contacted our customer regarding your
"beoutdoors.com" spam complaint.  Below is their
explanation describing the
situation. 

Between Friday evening May 5, 2000 and Monday morning,
May 8, 2000 there was unauthorized use of beOutdoors
assets and its
Internet access that resulted in the sending of
unsolicited commercial email to an unknown number of
email addresses.  This
was done without any authorization or knowledge of any
company manager.

Specifically sometime Friday evening May 5 one of our
young technical employees (now ex-employee) and a
friend of his entered
the beOutdoors facility (without authorization) and
set up an email program on an internal server to send
our cash sweepstakes
announcement to email addresses contained on a CD the
employees friend had acquired.

We are unable to determine the number of emails sent
or to whom they were sent since three of our internal
servers crashed as
a result of the individuals unauthorized use.  Based
upon complaints we do know that many individuals
received several copies
of the email.

Due to the crash of our internal servers it has taken
us a little over a week to become fully operational
again and complete
our investigation to determine if there was criminal
intent.  After a discussion with the District
Attorney’s office and the
individuals who perpetrated the email disaster it
appears that there was no criminal intent just
misguided, unauthorized
actions by two very immature individuals.  The
employee was terminated but not prosecuted.

We want to apologize to Exodus and any others that may
have been impacted in anyway by the unauthorized
actions of a now
former employee.

 ---

 
--  Eric Uratchko 
Policy Enforcement Specialist
Exodus Communications, Inc. 
1-888-2EXODUS, Ext. 7700  
 
-- Kathleen 
Policy Enforcement Manager 
Exodus Communications, Inc. 
1-888-2EXODUS, Ext. 3984 



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