Overview of spam from Woodside

9 Aug 2008

Note: Automated spam monitoring stopped several years ago. These web pages are maintained for historical reasons. Some may be updated from time to time as news about the individual sites becomes available.

General information about Woodside

In short, aspiring writers or photographers are told that their work is salable but that they need to pay various fees to Woodside before their work can be sold. The fees continue to escalate, but the artist never sells their work.

REMEMBER: No reputable agent ever charges money up front.

For more info, see waytosuccess info page.

• 28 July 1997: Woodside has moved to Worldnet
• 28 Sept 1997: Woodside has moved to Prodigy
• 12 Nov 1997: Woodside has moved to Compuserve
• 28 Nov 1997: The New York Attorney General has filed suit against Woodside. See their press release entitled Vacco Throws The Book At Phony Internet Publisher. See also: the Jayne Hitchcock information page "The Case of the Woodside Literary Agency", the New York Times article "Queens Company Bilked Writers on Internet, State Suit Says"
• 10 Jan 2000: It is reported that Ursula Sprachmann and James Leonard have been arrested. See netnews article HUGE, BIG WOODSIDE NEWS!. See also this copy of an affidavit. This news has not yet been confirmed.
• 16 Jan 2000: The Naples, Florida Daily News has an article about the arrests. Read Marco Island couple sued for $10 million in Internet cyberstalking harassment suit
• 19 May 2000: Ursula Sprachmann and James Leonard have pleaded guilty in federal court. See netnews article Woodside Pleads Guilty for full info.

There is no contact info for Woodside. Try postmaster

A complete history may also be available.

General notes:

• Only a small subset of usenet (261 groups) was sampled. Only articles that hadn't been cancelled yet were counted. Actual spam may have been much greater.
• Heuristics that detect single-posted articles are, by their very nature, somewhat shaky. Innocent articles may be tagged as spam because they share certain characteristics or keywords with actual spam. In particular, a posted spam complaint that includes the spam in its entirety will very often be identified as spam.
• Some posts may be forgeries intended to look like they came from Woodside.
• The first entry in the history file is not used to compute peak or average spam counts, as this entry covers an unknown number of days. This may cause an apparent disreprency between spam totals and spam averages.

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This page maintained by Ed Falk