How I helped nail the 'manhood' spammer - 1

Two years ago Radio 4 reporter Simon Cox wrote in the Magazine about how he had traced the mastermind of an e-mail spamming scam. It signalled the start of a legal case which has just seen the spammer ordered to pay a huge fine. It all started with a bottle of pills. They were the colour of bluebottles and as big as beetles. In December 2007 I ordered the "Manster" pills from the Elite Herbal Website - advertised in an e-mail for their penis enlargement qualities.

I paid $70 for the promise of "new exciting horizons of sensual pleasure". I wanted to find the spammers who plague our inboxes with unwanted e-mails and Elite Herbal was the ideal place to start. As well as Manster the site sold everything from diet pills to herbal Viagra and was part of the world's biggest spamming operation. Finding the men who ran it wasn't going to be easy. I decided to follow the money trail. After various dead ends I managed to track a computer monitoring Elite Herbal orders to an IP address [a unique code ascribed to each computer on the internet] in Christchurch in New Zealand.