Flutterby™! : The lure of scum

Had an interesting morning, met with the owner of a '1 to infinity' gifting (MLM-ish) site and e-marketeer. He needs a new system, a little database work and some changes made to evolve and 'stay legal'. He also sells and uses 'marketing databases' and teaches his downstream to use 'stealth mailers' and similiar techniques to recruit prospects. Claims to have made 200k+ last year. But can barely afford to pay for the development of his next system. Searching for his domain name (I'm keeping him anonymous for my own protection), finds lots of spammish e-mails pointing back to his site and it's cloned/replicated derivitives...

And then, while I was toying with doing it anyway (it is potentially good paying work, after all), Nancy e-mailed me an e-mail that contained: "..authoritative enough to defend what is true & just." - It was the clincher.

After spending years working on the 'white hat' side of the 'net, some things just aren't worth any amount of money. Adding my level of internet related technical, e-commerce, business and database expertise to the scummy underside of the 'net would make me feel like a barnacle, and right now life is too good to play with the large shipload of bad karma this thing has.

It was interesting hearing it from his perspective. But all of a sudden I need to take a bath.