Swank - moderator

History:
This one was posted on December 8th, 2006 by veruccawatcher




For the non-spammers, Swank is probably best known from Spam Kings (http://spamkings.oreilly.com/), "Richard Cunningham".
We think he actually is a minor player among the spammers.
He likes to give the impression of being a big player.
Most of his stuff has usually gone to pieces. Mainly a middle man.
ssoft.biz is apparently his now, earlier domains are down.
Seems he is running a forum for spammers there.
Most of his older domains are either dead or not renewed.
He likes to give the impression of being good at social engineering, investigating scammers and "antis". And of course he likes bragging about what a big guy he is, how long he has been in "the industry", what he has done earlier and so on.
Now that is a bit dangerous for him. We are coming very close, almost in his backyard by following all the trails he is giving. By following those, comparing various stories, doublechecking with other sources we are getting a picture of this guy.
He claims giving his attention more to his "legitimate" businesses now. Probably some VOIP, historically he has got a hang for opps involving that kind of stuff, e.g. Cognigen and other telecommunications/internet related. He is not doing too good though, not having too much money.
According to other sources he is running 6-7 PCs from home. Not all of them in good shape, he looses stuff regularly. A couple of them seems to be below the 1GHz mark too and he tries to upgrade them (messing it up of course, his uncle was apparently not a very good teacher, or Swank has difficulties learning).

To be continued/edited .....