GirlsGoneVengeful: The Farrah Ashline Affair

I received a tip a few months back about a site called GirlsGoingOut.com that seemed to be closing up. Alas, by the time I got there the site had been removed, but good copies have been preserved at The Internet Archive. See:

web.archive.org/web/20021129223513/
http://girlsgoingout.com/

GirlsGoingOut.com's purpose was summed up in a December, 2002 story in the Washington Post "a new matchmaker for gals looking to make platonic pals". An article in Forbes entitled "No Boys Allowed" provided similar high-visibility coverage in that same month.

GirlsGoOut.com charged a subscription fee of $60 a year for women to join, and its CEO, Farrah Ashline, who the Washington Post likened to "a young Gloria Steinem" claimed at one point to have gotten 4,000 subscribers to have paid its one-time $60 "processing" fee.

Unfortunately, the glossy front end of GirlsGoingOut.com appears to have concealed some allegedly dirty dealings in the back-office. Numerous ex-employees have claimed that they were never paid by Ms. Ashline, members have alleged that they never received services for their payment, and others allege that Ms. Ashline has a shady past. The result of these grievances have been a series of sites erected for the sole purpose of getting even with GirlsGoingOut's CEO.

One such site is www.farrahashline.com/, an "an unofficial resource site for information related to Paidia Linefar, aka Farrah Ashline, Creator and CEO of Washington DC's GirlsGoingOut.com and WOMagazine.com. This page is being brought to you by a collective of web designers, artists, illustrators, writers, and other ex-employees of Ms.Ashline who have (allegedly) yet to be paid for their work." The site SpecialAgency.Net hosts a page that similarly brims with information about Ms. Ashline at http://www.specialagency.net/arc/000101.html.

A third site, karma.fnord.net, does something very interesting: it uses The Internet Archive to actually document what his alleged to be the high staff turnover rate at GirlsGoOut.com, the first known use of the Archive in an employee-employer dispute.

Once again, the Net has proved that it is a unique organizing medium for the aggrieved. On the above sites, information is disseminated, tips are traded, links are posted, and bile is emptied. The advent of these sites prompted even Washington Post, whose first article about GirlsGoingOut was laudatory, to launch into an angry series of exposes that made Farrah Ashline, in the newspaper's words "The Most Unpopular Girl in Town."

There is very little left of the original GirlsGoOut.com, aside from pages preserved at the Internet Archive, which don't appear to go many levels deep, but I was able to find what appears to be a fully-functional copy of GirlsGoOut at the following URL:

www.boston.ggo.test.janmedia.com/about/index.xml This development site features a number of interesting artifacts, including many pictures of Farrah, and yes - an invitation soliciting writers to join GirlsGoOut.com.

In the meantime, if the Farrah-tracking sites are right, Farrah (who has now apparently reinvented herself as "Paidia Linefar", now runs a PR company and event-planning company which is about to embark on a multi-city series of workshops that, in exchange for $399, will instruction people how to get into the "event-planning" business.

On the side, someone named "Padia" with the e-mail address "newwavetherapy@hotmail.com" continues to advertise solicitations for "Affordable Psychotherapy, Massage with Yoga" services on sites such as CraigsList.

It remains to be seen whether "Padia's" past will ever really catch up with her.

The Insider: Ghostly Traces of Jason Smathers

What Do We Know About Jason Smathers? What kind of guy would conspire to steal 92 million AOL screen names from his employer and sell them to a spammer for $100,000? Well, here's what I know right now:

1. Jason was a Hard-Core Gamer
Smathers was hog wild for PlayStation games. Here is a list of games that he at one point possessed; its source is a February 2000 posting to alt.games.video.sony.playstation.

I have these games but dont have a CDR, if you can supply me with backups, I'd appriciate(sic) it. Here is the list of games I have:

Grand theft auto
No.2222 ROAD RUSH JAILBREAK(US FINAL)
No.2080 RACING 2 IN 1 : NEED FOR SPEED + V RALLY 2(RACING)
No.2217 CHAOS BREAK(SHOOTING)
No.2215 BIO HAZARD GUN SURVIVOR(SHOOTING)
No.2193 THE DUKES OF HAZZARD(US FINAL)
No.2191 PRO PINBALL FANTASIC JOURNEY(US)
No.2179 SOUTH PARK RALLY(US FINAL)
No.2144 ACTION BASS(SPORT)
No.2048 RESIDENT EVIL 3 NEMESIS(US FINAL)
No.2040 KNOCKOUT KING 2000(US FINAL)
No.2027 WORMS ARMAGEDDON(US FINAL)
No.1998 TEST DRIVE OFF ROAD 3(US FINAL)
No.1992 FORMULA ONE 99(RACING)
No.1990 PONG(US FINAL)
No.1980 MULTI 3 IN 1 GAME
No.1977 PAC MAN WORLD(US FINAL)
No.1948 DEMOLITION RACER(US FINAL)
No.1784 UFO(ETC)
No.1773 THE NEXT TETRIS(US FINAL)
No.1762 OVER DRIVIN' IV(RACING)
No.1516 INTERNAL SECTION(SHOOTING)

2. Jason Was an Active Spammer While Employed By AOL
In a flurry of messages posted during 2000 to such USENET groups as alt.marketing.online.ebay, slo.for-sale, misc.entrepreneurs, uk.business.agriculture, tnn.business, and alt.vacation.las-vegas, Smathers posted a range of commercial, spam-like messages. The noise level Smathers created with these USENET spams was enough to cause one member of alt.marketing.ebay to perform the online equivalent of throwing up his hands.

On 21 Feb 2000 01:48:15 GMT, (Jason) wrote:
>Did you know you can email money with PayPal.com?
Yeah, yeah, like tell us something we don't f**ing know, Jason!!!

All during this time, Smathers was employed by AOL, and his employer did nothing to stop this behavior. It is questionable whether it could have done so even if it wanted to, but one must ask whether it's proper for active AOL employees to have contacts in the Spam industry or to be active spammers themselves.

3. Jason was a Penny-Stock Trader and Real Estate Investor
Smathers spent a lot of time in 2001 and 2002 posting to alt.invest.penny-stocks. He claimed to be making lots of money, and was continually seeking tips on "hot stocks" and "penny stock newsletters."

In early 2002, he began looking for property in New Mexico, specifically Alberquerque. This message was posted in USENET in February 6, 2002:

Hello.
I am looking for private investors to hold notes on Real Estate. I invest in anything from Mobile Homes to Houses to Shopping Malls. If you are interested,
please send me an email.
Regards,
Jason

4. Jason Liked Guns and Knew How to Handle Them
In an August 23, 2003 posting made at Packing.org (the Concealed Carry Database), Jason wrote:

Kel-Tec w/ a limp wrist?
The Kel-Tec seems to be a pretty solid gun, I don't know if I have much respect for the .32 round though. Anyhow, if I were to guess, I would say the reason your Kel-Tec works and your wife's didn't is your grip was firm and hers was jamming because of limp wrist syndrome. I love my Kimber, but from what I have seen, Kel-Tec is the way to go if you need an inexpensive lightweight firearm. -Jason

5. Jason Liked to Travel
In 2003 and 2004, Smathers posted many queries asking about the lowest prices for hotel rooms in Brussels, Copenhagen, and in Canada.

As reently as June 19, just three days before his arrest, Smathers posted multiple messages to a Boston bulletin board seeking to rent a hotel room in Boston, which strongly suggests that he had no idea that the Feds were hot on his trail. He seems to have been caught completely flat-footed.

An Ordinary Young Man?
I have so sympathy for what Smathers is alleged to have done. But my research, albiet sketchy, reveals a profile of a very ordinary American male, who liked games, guns, and penny stocks, the same "holy trinity" beloved by most young American guys today. Jason was ambitious, and when he got money, he started travelling and having a good time. He seems no better and no worse than most young people.

Curiously, he was also a young man who believed that businesses are morally obliged to provide good service. In a critical review of a business on a site called DealzNet, Smathers wrote:

1/5/04 2:45 PM (1 of 1 users found this review helpful)
This merchant deserves a 9.0 on price, it is hard to beat them. However, they deserve a 0 in "Likelihood of Future Purchases", "Shipping and Packaging", "Technical Support", and "Return or Replacement". A good price is not a good deal when you never recieve your item and customer service is non existant (sic).

This is not the writing of a completely amoral man. But it might be the writing of somebody who does not completely understand that ethical standards are double-edged swords that don't just apply to other people. This lesson, sadly, is largely missing from our culture today, and it remains to be seen whether it was part of the culture of AOL.

What is peculiar about this case is that Smathers already seems to have had a bit of money before he started stealing screen names from AOL. Before his alleged crime, on USENET, he was actively contacting seeking out investment targets. He claimed to be making money "19 times out of 20" on penny stocks. He was fully employed. Did one of these investments go wrong, forcing him into to seek cash? Or did he simply let ambition run away with him?

What's also odd is that Smathers wasn't a dumb-as-a-post AOL marketing dweeb but an engineer (Smathers evidently hoped to complete his Ph.D online). He had full working knowledge of how AOL's system works, and knew or should have known about how AOL's logging mechanism tracks accesses to the screen name database. Once people started to track back the breach from the outside, amd the Feds put two and two togeter, Jason Smathers was a sitting duck.

I'm sure we'll be hearing much more about Smathers in the coming weeks. The portrait will likely not be flattering, especially when it appears in news organizations with formal relationships with AOL (which has vowed to send him to jail for a long time).

You've Got Unconscious Humor

Yesterday, the world began learning about how an employee at AOL sold 92 million customer names to a spammer.

Around 5 PM yesterday, I first saw this story appear on the home page of the New York Times. I clicked on the link, which brought me to a story-level page.

On this same page is a big AOL ad reading:

ADD MORE KNOWLEDGE

I took a screenshot of this page.

More knowledge indeed!

The question on the tongue of every AOL user in the world today is "how secure is my credit card information?" AOL will assure us that this information is in a "locked box" somewhere, and that accused engineer Smathers never had the keys to the box. (Of course, Smathers never posessed keys to the screen name database either. He used some social engineering to "borrow" its keys: a "blended attack" on AOL's crownn jewels that worked remarkably well and wasn't caught for a long time).

This incident will likely go down in history as the greatest breach of the public trust since it was revealed last year that airline JetBlue was sharing customer information with a government contractor working on a bid for a homeland security contract.

AOL users have no cause to rest easy today: the 92 million-screen name database is "in play", and there are probably copies lying around on the desks of every direct marketer's desk in the country now. Yes, this list becomes less valuable with time and "churn", but it's still valuable enough to be sold and re-sold for at least a year.

"More knowledge" indeed.

Note: The Smoking Gun has the complaint filed against Smithers and Sean Dunaway, the direct-marketer who allegedly bought the purloined list, online here:

thesmokinggun.com/archive/0623042aol1.html