Money for spam

Photo / Martin Sykes.

It began with the promise of enhanced sexual performance and, ergo, a rosy future. Such is the world of pharmaceutical spam.

Spam lands daily by the hundreds of millions in in-boxes around the world, despite the best efforts of an industry dedicated to filtering it.

Email users cuss at the cost of trying to keep spam at bay, and at the faceless people who cause them to be sent. But spam exists because enough people respond. Educated people too, as Brian McWilliams, author of Spam Kings, discovered when he managed to access the file directory of a spammer's website. Buyers included doctors and senior businessmen.

One who recently responded to "spamvertising" of Manster, a brand of herbal pills promised to add "intimate inches', was London-based BBC reporter Simon Cox.

Cox clicked on the link in the spam email which took him to the website of Elite Herbal, which proclaimed itself the number one supplier of penis enlargement products. He ordered a bottle of Manster pills, filled in his creditcard details and set about discovering what and whom lay beyond.

The spam email purported to be sent by a woman from a library in Florida. A quick call to the library revealed it was a fake name.

So Cox followed the money. The reporter's Visa payment was processed by servepay.com, a website based in India that was associated with an organisation called Genbucks, which sold herbal products through what it called "affiliates", sales people scattered around the globe.

The suspicion is they are often spammers.

During research for his book, McWilliams posed as an affiliate to find buyers for a man selling fake Rolex watches. "He maintained the website, he was responsible for shipping out the orders," McWilliams told the BBC. McWilliams role was to bring in customers.

"I could do that however I wanted and obviously I did it through spam."

Cox rang a number for Genbucks in Mumbai.

The next step in the BBC's investigation was provided by Henrik Uffe Jensen, a Danish IT consultant whose curiosity about spam prompted him to investigate and record his findings in a blog called Spam In My Inbox. Jensen had been on the trail of Elite Herbal too, and had placed a piece of code in an order he'd sent that enabled him to see the unique internet provider address of the internet user accessing his order.

One of the computers tracking Jensen's order was in New Zealand and its internet service provider was ihug, part of Vodafone New Zealand.

After making inquiries, Vodafone told the BBC it believed the customer was sending spam, although operating behind "a number of other slave or zombie computers".