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February 7, 2006

Snake Oil, Inc.

Sometimes the best way to get rich in the spam business is by working behind the scenes. Supplying spammers with privately labelled pills, for example.

Spam Kings readers may recall that a Wichita, Kansas company played a key role in making neo-Nazi-turned-spammer Davis Hawke into a millionaire. Certified Natural Laboratories, Inc. supplied Hawke with Pinacle penis pills, RaveX brand ephedra, and other herbal products, which Hawke advertised through hundreds of millions of spams to AOL members and other Internet users.

Hawke has been sued out of the spam trade, but it looks like business is still booming for Certified Natural (formerly Internet Products Distributors, Inc., a.k.a. Consolidated Chemical, Inc.). The company's president, Dennis Wilkie, has been buying up historic buildings in Wichita, including a church and a theater. Wilkie also picked up the 63,000-square-foot Board of Trade Center to use as Certified's new headquarters.

To finance the deals, Wilkie has created an investment firm called Poodle Corp. The firm's website isn't up and running yet, but it's currently hosted at the same IP address as drunkenmonkeytechnique.com, a site that once hosted a number of files for Hawke's spam operation (partially archived here). (The site is registered to Certified's director of Internet sales and head spammer recruiter, David Lawrence.)

When I was researching Spam Kings, Wilke's son, Allen, claimed the company had no record of ever doing business with Hawke, his company Amazing Internet Products, or several or Hawke's aliases and dbas.

In recent months, there have been a few bumps in the road for Certified. Last June, the company received a warning from the Food and Drug Administration about misleading claims Certified was making for its fatblast X-TREME, Extreme Fat Burner, and Advantage Carb Blocker diet pills.

Drugmaker Glaxo specifically cited Certified Natural in a July 2005 complaint to the FDA about weight-loss supplement marketers being unresponsive to warnings about unsubstantiated claims.

Meanwhile, Certified's Maxaman, Suregasm, Nymphomax, and other snake oil products continue to be heavily promoted by spammers, judging from online complaints. (You can review Certified's wholesale catalog at this page.)

Ebay has been a big marketplace for Certified's products as well. A Kansas-based Ebay seller using the ID Health2day has filled thousands of orders for pills. The person behind Health2day, who identifies herself as Kelli and uses the email address weswit@yahoo.com, seems to have a very close connection to Certified Natural.

That same Yahoo email address is listed in the PayPal link at a site called Supplamart.com, which is hosted at the same IP address as certifiednatural.net. An ad at the Supplamart.com site for Certified's Suregasm pulls images from KansasVideo.com, which is registered to Island View Productions Inc., a Wichita company owned by none other than Dennis Wilke of Certified Natural Laboratories.

Posted by brian at February 7, 2006 3:01 PM