Wired News has picked up on the Warp Generator thread and found confirmation that the Time Travel spammer that has given us so much joy during the last months in fact is Robert ”Robby” Todino from Woburn. Just like we have speculated about.
Wired News journalist Brian McWilliams has talked to both Robert Todino, and his father:
A trail of Internet clues has fingered Robert ”Robby” Todino as the source of the time-travel messages. In a telephone interview last week, the 22-year-old Woburn, Massachusetts, resident admitted that he has sent nearly 100 million of the bizarre messages since November 2001.
”It almost feels worthless now because the people who are monitoring my every move always seem to win. But it’s the only form of communication I have right now,” Todino said.
His father, Robert Todino Sr., worries that malicious users have preyed on Robby’s ”psychological problems” and bilked him out of money.
”What bothers me is that some people are trying to sell him equipment and take advantage of him,” said Todino Sr. ”He’s invested a lot of money into it and has been hurt by it.”
Read on at
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,60141,00.html
Dave Hill‘s alien tech online store is mentioned in the article, and right now it is of course unavailable. I know what it’s like to get a link from Wired. Not many sites can take that kind of traffic. Since Dave is a smart he has probably temporarily taken it down while removing all heavy graphics, storing them in a zillion different locations. Bandwidth can be expensive…
The Wired News article also confirms that it has in fact been Robert Todino who has been the originator of older spam messages in the same category.
In December 2001, a three-page, single-spaced message signed by someone named ”Robby” began appearing in many Internet users’ inboxes. The e-mail described how the author had been drugged and poisoned as a child by a woman his father had dated. He said he needed a ”time traveler” to help him ”take back what was stolen from me in the first place. MY LIFE.”