A Weblog About Topics and Issues Discussed in the Book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams

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March 9, 2006

Porn-spam mom's plea

Turns out the porn-spam mom isn't a mom after all. MommyJobs.com operator Jennifer Clason has posted a detailed entry at her site about her stint in the porn-spam business. One of her "come clean" revelations: she doesn't actually have any children. jennifer clason

The web posting essentially confirms the key details of Clason's recent plea agreement(PDF file). E.g., she managed porn websites from 1999 -2003 for James R. Schaffer, who operated a company called Diamond International. Schaffer also partnered with Jeffrey Kilbride. In January of 2004, Clason learned how to use a spam program capable of sending spam from a remote server in Amsterdam. Starting in April 2004, she sent millions of spams that included embedded pornographic images and used falsified "from" lines. AOL received over 600,000 complaints about the spams from January-June, 2004. Clason was paid around $30,000 for her work. Etc.

Clason even admits at her site to having taken "2 different anti-depressants to cope with this stress." (As a condition of her release in September 2005, Clason was ordered to refrain from using any alcohol, and ordered to receive alcohol counselling, as well as mental health treatment.)

What Clason doesn't address in her web posting is that, while she may have given up spamming, she's still in the porn business. As we pointed out yesterday, Clason still runs a number of porn gateway sites, including Hardcore-skank-porn.com, Broadbandblowjobs.com, and trailertrashvideos.com.

Clason also continues to recommend that her site visitors participate in a variety of dubious money-making programs, including high-yield investment programs. Clason even posted a graphic showing how much she made in one day via HYIPs, despite warnings from the Securities and Exchange Comission.

In a recent post about the conviction of a person for running a Ponzi scheme, Clason had this to say: "The stupid government should just stay out of our affairs. People know the risks, let them lose their money at their own discretion!!!"

Clason's former employer Schaffer has pleaded not guilty to all counts. His trial is set for May 2 in Phoenix. Kilbride's trial is scheduled for June 6.

Much of Clason's 16-page plea agreement is devoted to describing the requirements of her cooperation with prosecutors. Her June sentencing may be postponed, according to the document, "until such time as defendant's cooperation has been completed."

Posted by brian at March 9, 2006 2:31 PM

Comments

Talk about being in denial, if her post on her board isn't the posterchild for the mentality of a spammer I don't know what is.


Posted by: Some Dude at March 9, 2006 5:47 PM

There is so much misinformation in your post that I don't know where to begin.

I didn't undergo any alcohol or mental treatments. It was up to the discretion of my Pretrial Release officer and she knows I'm just fine.

Secondly, yes I told everyone I was still in the porn business. I feed my family from my adult sites. It will take time to grow the income with my non-porn sites. In the meantime what do you suggest we do? Live on welfare and make YOU pay for us?? I didn't think so.

I don't "recommend" anyone participate in anything. I have a GPA forum (get paid to) that tons of the mommies love. They go there and chat with each other about progams they are making money on. You act like I'm some cult leader and force the money out of their pockets. Ironically, I've only been doing this for a very short while! Most of these ladies have taught ME these programs....single moms, Christian moms, etc. They are all invested in these programs long before I came along.

Charis Johnson wasn't convicted. Get your facts straight! Her company has been under investigation, but whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"??

And yes....the damn government should keep their noses out of our business. I don't need my hand held by them. I'm an adult and should be able to do as I please as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. Don't take that out of context, I'm referring to these "schemes" that you are talking about.

The government has been over-policing the people for 6 years now. At least I have the guts to say it.

P.S. Thanks for all of the publicity. Ironically my sales have skyrocketed!

Posted by: Jennifer Clason at March 9, 2006 8:58 PM

Jennifer, let me knwo when the rocket to your planet of I don't care takes off. I want to help you stay on it.

You honestly think the crap you spammed people with doesn't hurt people? You honestly think the schemes you pull aren't designed from the get go to sucker people?

Of course you know, you laugh all the way to the bank knowing it. I hope you get whats coming to you, unfortunately you will leave this legacy for your children. While I know you're proud of your actions, I somehow doubt they will be when the are old eno... oh wait, you lied about that too... good giref.

Posted by: AlrightyThen at March 9, 2006 10:25 PM

yes I told everyone I was still in the porn business


Oh, so that's what you meant by


I made a promise to God. I told him that I would stop working with the adult themed material as long as he helped me become a success with my non-adult sites (mommyjobs.com and my other sites). So far I am doing really well financially and able to support myself when things came tumbling down....

Posted by: AC at March 9, 2006 11:53 PM

I just wish she would stop projecting this "I am as pure as the white driven snow Christian attitude". When in reality she is a webmaster/porn hustler. It would sure make her life a whole lot easier, in that she wouldn't have to lie so much. That alone probably causes much of the stress in her life. IMO Jennifer is her own worst enemy.

Posted by: Joe Schmoe at March 10, 2006 1:41 AM

http://www.mommyjobs.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=593

*Snort* Rule #1 and #3 definitely in effect here.

I'm not sure which is funnier, the thread above or her lame excuse above of "Ironically my sales have skyrocketed!", why is it we always hear this whenever a spammer is exposed?

Posted by: Some Dude at March 10, 2006 9:49 AM

In my own experience, countless times, with dealing with spammers is that they lie. Spammers, as a lot, are great social engineers. They will tell the ISPs anything to stay online. Were I in the sordid spot this Jennifer Clason is in, I guess I would have tried to justify myself as this spammer has done here and on her website, but the damage has been done. Spammers are thieves (stealing bandwidth, time and resources of ISPs and others) and based on what Jennifer Clason wrote, she should have known early on (after getting on the Internet) that spamming is the scourge of the 'Net. After being online for a period of time, it does not take that long for most to figure this simple fact out, so I am guessing Jennifer Clason has a lot of naivete, but only she knows this for sure about herself.

... Thanks, Jennifer, for posting here and explaining yourself on your message board. It did take a lot of gumption to talk about personal issues online but I am leary of believing a lot of your story.

Posted by: Anonymouse at March 10, 2006 11:22 PM

Brian, you are just another corporate coward. Maybe that's the reason your career is not going anywhere at the moment. Instead of making up your own mind as any self-respecting journalist would, you are acting like the perfect kiss-ass footsoldier for AOL's corporate interests and spokeshole for an overzealous Bush administration prosecutory culture that has run amuk with its attempts at legislating morality.



The real scandal here is that the U.S. attorney's office is tripping over itself to send regular American businesspeople to prison because they either "offended" mighty taxpayer and lobbyist AOL, or "offended" people whose sexual morality is not that of a born-again Christian, George W Bush, who publicly states that "the jury is still out" on evolution vs. creation. Brian, "offending" people is not a crime - the right to offend is fundamentally American.



YOU, Brian, should be outraged that the Bush justice department is trying to ruin the life of a mere employee(!) of an e-mail marketing company that obviously just executed her bosses' instructions. The USDOJ is doing so with IMO *completely* trumped up charges: Read the plea bargain and tell me which provisions of CAN-SPAM this lady supposedly violated?



So her boss had a bunch of domains under various DBAs ("doing business as"), and some of them were in Mauritius. So f*ing what? Can an American businessman no longer choose where in the world he sets up shop, under whatever trademarks he chooses, so long as he reports his world income back to the IRS? Where does it say in CAN-SPAM that the postal complaint address must be in the U.S.? I get snail mail solicitations from anonymous P.O. boxes all the time - it's common practice in offline marketing. Why not online?



So they used a server in Amsterdam. I don't see the violation, either. Maybe servers are cheaper and faster in Amsterdam. Maybe U.S.-based server companies have their heads up their asses when it comes to pornography (scared of U.S. DOJ's overzealous pproscecution?). Since when can an American businessman not choose where in the world he rents servers? Of course the emails will show a dutch IP then. Where does it say in CAN-SPAM that the emails must be transmitted from the guy's home IP? IT DOESN'T!



By that logic, no U.S. corporation could hire call centers to make anonymous dinnertime sales calls to Americans. Hire an Indian call center, go to prison? Yes, hiding in Amsterdam and Mauritius makes it difficult for the AOL-prosecution-machine-gone-haywire to track down who is behind the emails. Yes, it makes it difficult to serve a civil suit. But not IMPOSSIBLE. Many legit direct marketing companies use such tactics. So long as the guy got his mail forwarded propetly from Mauritius, I don't see a criminal violation here.



AND: so long as the company honored all remove requests and labeled the email as SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT, I don't see any reason for the DOJ wasting taxpayer money on behalf of megacorporation AOL Time-Warner. Note that the plea bargain doesn't allege that removes weren't honored, which is the main thrust of CAN-SPAM. They must have wasted $200,000+ of taxpayer money to investigate and prosecute these people - for WHAT?



Brian, if you had any self-respect as a journalist, and wouldn't aspire so badly to become a pathetic mini facsimile of populistic hypemeister Bill O'Reilly (the O'Reilly of the spam world! Yawn!), then you would at least *consider* the side of the underdog here before posting your own fundamentalist and petty moral indictment of this lady.



Before you throw the first stone, what skeletons have you in your closet? Your career and your book is a pathetic path of destruction, littered with misinformation, false facts, hype, rumors and innuendo, that puts innocent people into false light. Every day that you post badly reserched pieces like this, and act as a volunteer corporate spokeshole for the special interests of AOL and other media megaconglomerates, you are ruining your own credibility just little a bit more. Where is your sense of *fairness* in all this?



When AOL and/or Bushes Christian/fundamentalist morality begin to turn this country into a police state where businessmen can only operate with one foot in prison because they choose to rent servers in Amsterdam where people aren't as sexually repressed as here, THAT is truly an obscene state of affairs, and worth writing about!



Which weighs more to you Brian, as a purported journalist/author: preserving the freedom of all of us from overzealous government and moralizing harassment, or AOL's petty, personal, special-interest claim that $10,000 damage was supposedly done cleaning up these people's otherwise by-and-large legal spam run? Which side are you on Brian?

Posted by: Hamster at March 11, 2006 1:33 PM

Since when can an American businessman not choose where in the world he rents servers?

Most likely when he or she has been shut out of all "legitimate" hosting service within their own country (ie: the US.) Why did you think?

Why on earth would someone choose to host a North-American-specific business's website in Amsterdam? The costs for bandwidth would be ridiculous, and server speed would be horrendously slow. The answer is mostly likely to be because no North American hosting provider would ever want to be associated with a frikkin' porn spammer. Sounds pretty obvious to me. No need to drape it in anti-government / anti-AOL rhetoric. Spam is bad. Spam is an annoyance. Porn spam, especially, is illegal in most countries around the world. There is no point in comparing a company with a call centre in India with someone who sends porn spam. That's like comparing apples to bulldozers.

Posted by: spamislame at March 13, 2006 12:29 PM

Hamster, normally I don't pay much attention to spam apologists, especially anonymous ones who hide behind proxies (archive.org -- clever). But your comment merits a response.

You suggest that the plea agreement shows Clason didn't violate the law, and you say that the charges against her are "trumped up." Never mind that the indictment, not the plea, details the charges against her. (I suggest you read it before you conclude that she and her co-conspirators are model citizens.)

The fact is, Clason pleaded guilty. If she plays her cards right, she may get off with a very light sentence while helping prosecutors send to jail the bosses she grew to hate. Until then, even the press releases from the Dept. of Justice will continue to say: "Kilbride and Schaffer are presumed innocent until and unless convicted at trial."

I think it's laughable for you to accuse me of being a corporate shill, and yet you call Clason and her bosses "regular American businesspeople." Like you say, which side am I on?

If you want to focus on real cases of people becoming sell-outs or "corporate cowards" as you call them, look at folks like the renegade hacker "The Unix Terrorist." I hear he's now working at a certain major bank in New York.

Posted by: Brian at March 13, 2006 11:23 PM

There's nothing illegal with buying a good wood-axe.

There's nothing wrong with buying a steel file.

There's nothing wrong with buying some rope.

There's nothing wrong with using the file to sharpen the axe.

....

But when your wife is found tied by the rope you bought last week and hacked up with the new axe you just sharpened, A jury is going to sit up and pay close attention to the rest of the evidence that gets presented.


Similarly with the Amsterdam web site. By itself, it doesn't say much, but when you combine it with the rest of the evidence, I can almost hear the calls to impose the UDP (Usenet Death Penalty).

Posted by: Stephen Samuel at March 15, 2006 10:19 PM

 

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