Laura Betterly

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Laura Betterly, also known as Laura Betterly-Blom, was born in Long Island, New York and lived there until 1995. She is presently a resident of Clearwater, Florida who, as the head of Data Resource Consulting, became notorious for sending large quantities of commercial e-mail in the early 21st century when she cracked as a joke, "call me the Spam Queen" to a Wall Street Journal reporter.^[1] Betterly is a member in good standing of the Church of Scientology^[2]^[3]. She has been married to Steven Blom, an officer in her corporation, since 2002. She has two children from her first marriage, Chris and Craig.^[4] Prior to her career in spamming, she was president and co-founder of Visiosonic, later known as PCDJ.COM, an mp3 music company.^[5] She worked with celebrities such as Ice T ^[6], Nile Rodgers, Jam Master Jay and Chaka Kahn.^[4] She has been a featured speaker at The Consumer Electronics Show^[7] and the Winter Music Conference.^[8]

1 Spamming methods and attitudes
2 Change of Tactics
3 External links
4 References

[edit] Spamming methods and attitudes

After leaving PCDJ.com Betterly founded Data Resource Consulting. On a typical day, her firm would send out 8-10 million spam emails, charging clients $600-$1,000 per million spams and about half that amount for a repeat barrage. She also charged clients for lead responses to spam emails.^[9] Unlike other mailers, Betterly said she did not forge headers, route messages through outside servers without permission, or use any of the other tricks that have drawn criticism of the spamming community. She also refused to send messages advertising adult products or services, or anything she believed to be illegal. She said that she only possessed the addresses of people who had expressed a desire to know more when signing up to other online services, and that she would honor any requests from recipients to unsubscribe from further mail.

Estimates indicate she may have earned at least US$200,000 per year. She said that she was "just trying to make a living like everyone else."^[1] Betterly publicly attacked those who exposed her spamming practices, “I have a beef against what I consider hate groups that are trying to shut down commercial e-mail”^[10] and referred to spamming as "a win-win situation"^[11]. To those who objected to receiving spam from her business she said, "I don't really care. As long as I'm not breaking any laws, you don't have to love me or like what I do for a living."^[1]

Data Resource Consulting lost a legal case in Kansas small claims court on 09 September, 2003. They were found guilty of 52 violations of KS 50-6,107, the commercial electronic mail act, including:

Failure to place ADV: in the subject line
No company address or 800 phone number
A non-working unsubscribe link
Obscuring the point of origin or transmission path^[12]

[edit] Change of Tactics

In September of 2005, Betterly and the chairman of her corporation, Bob Cefail, "fired" the radio station in Clearwater, Florida where her program,"The Profit Doctors" aired, allegedly because the station management discontinued the toll-free call-in number.^[13] The following year, the pair "rehired" the same radio station to air a new program called Scooopradio.

Betterly took her company (In Touch Media Group) public and announced her retirement from the bulk commercial e-mail business on 10 October 2005, referring to spam as "a four-letter word" and stating that bulk emailing had deteriorated into "a bunch of unprofessional, ineffective scams" due to its negative image ^[14]. She also attempted to distance herself from pro-spam statements that she made in earlier media interviews,"I have never advocated spam or sending spam."^[15]

In Touch Media lost over $2 million.^[16] The company's latest 8-K filing with the SEC reveals they received another $1 million in funding for expansion.