Oh dear.

Last night Dateline NBC ran a piece on tracking down porn spammers.

If you missed the piece, you’ll definitely want to check out the MSNBC version of the show— everyone is going to be talking about this around the water cooler Monday.

The feature (which long-time anti-spam activist Ray Everett Church points out was shot six months ago) starts when a Texas housewife gets zoo-sex spam and calls John Hockenberry instead of hitting delete. Hockenberry takes up the case and near the end of the second page we find out that:

Sadly, no owners are listed on the Web site itself, but Web sites have to be registered, kind of like a car has to be registered. And we found the place that keeps those registrations. We were told that “Spunkfarm” was associated with a company in Toronto, Canada.

Whoever sent Julie those pictures is in a nice place like Toronto?

There is one place in Toronto that might help us: It’s called Tucows. That’s the place that registers those Web site names. It’s what led us to Toronto to begin with. The receptionist is happy to look up the name “Spunkfarm” for us. We get another address — this one very nearby. We discover that down these dingy alleys of old industrial buildings, and a man on the street tells us that the whole area here is all dot-coms. “Mostly, mostly porn though,” he adds. We’re at Toronto’s Internet porn district. The man takes us around back to the freight elevator and gives an idea what goes on inside this building. There are more companies that seem to see porn within the building. At this point, no one knows we are with “Dateline” or that we’re wearing hidden cameras. We find the building and start asking questions…

I’m sure Tucows isn’t going to be too happy with being called “the place that registers those Web site names” but I think they might also have to do some spin doctoring on why they’re giving out customer addresses to anyone who stops by reception. I won’t recap the rest of the article, but I will tell you that they do in fact find the spammers and not only are they in Liberty Village but in Montreal.

While digging around a bit on this I found Brian McWilliams’ Spam Kings blog for his book of the same name. Interesting insider stuff (apparently the guy in Montreal is a “chickenboner”). He’s got some great links to stuff MSNBC didn’t mention. “Republic of T” takes a different approach in “Idiots with Email” pointing out that a spam filter might be easier than calling in Dateline. In the comments there someone echoes June’s inbox license rant.

It’s interesting how this plays out — the locals find it ironic, while over at LiveJournal some are suggesting “Toronto’s porn alley” should be part of our guided tours:

“And did you know that there is a whole underground internet porn industry in this one section of the city?!?!?! There were all these old industrial buildings that now house as said before, internet porn. And when we were there WHY did we not go there?”

Maybe we should replace “Toronto Unlimited” with “Visit Toronto’s Porn Alley”.

Update: Image taken from York Heritage Properties. I hope they don’t mind.

Update 2: Apparently they do mind. Image removed.

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Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on August 6, 2005.