There are people in this industry you lose track of and genuinely miss. And then there are people you lose track of and think, "Well, maybe the universe finally handled that one." Scott Richter is the second kind.

I hadn't thought about Richter in years, which was frankly a gift to my blood pressure. But there he was, popping up in my feed like one of the 100 million daily spam emails his company used to send, except this time he was wearing a backwards cap, screaming at a slot machine, and calling himself "Raja."

Raja.

Let that marinate. A convicted felon who built his fortune selling your grandmother's email address to penis pill companies now wants you to call him Raja. And thousands of people do. We'll get to that.

Scott Richter's career is what happens when you give a guy with zero shame and zero quit access to the internet and then just... never successfully stop him. He started out in the restaurant business in Colorado, became the youngest liquor license holder in the state at 21, which in retrospect was probably the last legal achievement on his résumé that didn't require an asterisk.

By the early 2000s, Richter had pivoted to "email marketing," which is a polite way of saying he became one of the most prolific spammers on the planet. His company, OptInRealBig.com (and yes, that was the real name, because subtlety was never his strong suit) was blasting out 100 million emails a day. A DAY. You know those emails about enlarging body parts you didn't ask to have enlarged? Thank Scott. You know those "You've been approved for $10,000!" subject lines that your mom almost clicked on? Also Scott.

He was so good at being terrible that Spamhaus put him on the ROKSO list, the Register of Known Spam Operations, basically the FBI's Most Wanted for people who ruin your inbox. He landed at number three worldwide. Bronze medal in being the worst person on the internet. In a field that includes literal criminals running botnets out of Eastern European basements, Scotty here managed to medal from a suburb of Denver. Incredible.

One of his most famous campaigns? Selling most-wanted Iraqi playing cards in 2003. He claims to have sold 40,000 decks before they were even printed. The man was literally profiting off a war before the merch existed. If grift were an Olympic sport, Scott Richter would be on a Wheaties box.

In December 2003, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer (yes, THAT Eliot Spitzer, who clearly had a nose for sleaze long before we found out about his own) teamed up with Microsoft to sue Richter. Microsoft was seeking $18 million. Richter, displaying the tactical genius that defines his entire career, "openly criticized Spitzer's probe."

Bold strategy for a guy whose entire business model was "send everyone on Earth an email about diet pills."

He settled with New York for $50,000, essentially couch-cushion money, but Microsoft wasn't so easily charmed. Facing a potential $500 million judgment, OptInRealBig filed for bankruptcy. The company claimed less than $10 million in assets and more than $50 million in debt. He eventually paid Microsoft $7 million and promised, pinky swear, to stop spamming.

He did not stop spamming.

By 2007, MySpace (remember MySpace?) sued his new company, Media Breakaway, for allegedly hijacking user accounts to send millions of spam messages that looked like they came from your friends. Think about that. Your buddy's MySpace page sends you a message and it's actually Scott Richter trying to sell you a weight loss miracle. An arbitrator hit him with $4.8 million in damages and $1.2 million in attorney's fees. Then CBS News reported that Media Breakaway was charging people's cell phones for ringtones they never ordered.

This is a man who looked at the concept of "learning from your mistakes" and said, "No thanks, I'll just find new mistakes."

He was also interviewed on The Daily Show by Rob Corddry, which honestly might be the most honest representation of his career. A comedy segment. That's where Scott Richter belongs. Between the fake news and the actual jokes.

But here's the thing that really ties the room together. Before Scott Richter was the Spam King, he was running a fencing operation. Not the kind with swords. The kind with stolen goods out of a bar.

Denver police, acting on a tip about a stolen Bobcat loader, sent undercover officers to the Colorado Sports Cafe, the bar Richter co-owned with his partner Bob Nelson.

Over thirteen months, cops made deals with Richter and Nelson for a Honda generator, cases of cigarettes, laptop computers, and other items, all offered at what the court records charmingly describe as "suspiciously low prices."

In one memorable transaction, Richter loaded 120 cartons of Marlboros, purchased for $1,200 from an undercover cop, into his Lexus SUV.

His Lexus SUV. Because when you're buying what you absolutely know is stolen merchandise, you want to do it with leather seats and a premium sound system.

He pleaded guilty in 2003 to felony grand larceny. This would come back to haunt him a decade later when ICANN, the organization that oversees domain name registration, discovered that Richter was secretly running a registrar called Dynamic Dolphin.

Dynamic Dolphin. I want you to picture a grown man, a convicted felon, sitting at a computer, registering the name "Dynamic Dolphin" for his company, and thinking, "Yes. This is it. This is the one." The names this man chooses are a cry for help.

ICANN terminated the company because Richter had hidden both his ownership and his felony conviction. Their filing noted his "material misrepresentation, material inaccuracy, or materially misleading statement," which is bureaucrat-speak for "this guy lied about literally everything on the application." Brian Krebs, the cybersecurity journalist who'd been on Richter's case for years, basically did ICANN's homework for them. It took ICANN five years to act on the tip. Five years! Scott Richter could have started and bankrupted two more companies in that time. (He probably did.)

Because no Scott Richter biography is complete without a gentleman's club: somewhere in the mid-2010s, Richter became the owner of Platinum 84, a strip club in Federal Heights, Colorado.

The club made headlines when Chris Brown's entourage got into an altercation there, and Richter, now styling himself as "head of club operations," gave quotes to the Denver Post about what happened on Brown's tour bus. Because of course he did. The man has never met a microphone he didn't want to talk into.

The club also won a local holiday lights contest. Richter donated the $100 prize, plus $1,200 raised from a "Twerking for Tots" charity event, to a police-run toy drive.

I want to say that again. Twerking for Tots. At a strip club. For charity. Run by a convicted felon and spam king.

You literally cannot make this stuff up. If I pitched this as a TV show, Netflix would reject it for being too unrealistic. "Nobody is this person," they'd say. And they'd be wrong.

And now, the latest chapter. Scott Richter, convicted felon, serial spammer, strip club impresario, buyer of stolen Marlboros from undercover cops, has reinvented himself as "Raja," a YouTube slot machine influencer. And honestly? It might be his greatest grift yet. Not because it's illegal (as far as I know, it isn't), but because it's the purest distillation of everything Scott Richter has ever been.

His channel, "The Big Jackpot," has over 645,000 subscribers. He live-streams himself playing high-stakes slots at casinos across the country. He has a second channel called Raja Slots. He has a merch store. He has a mobile app. He has a Patreon with tiered memberships going up to $1,000 a month for something called "King for a Day." He organizes fan cruises.

He writes for Entrepreneur magazine. Let me repeat that: Entrepreneur. Magazine. A publication that ostensibly exists to help people build legitimate businesses has a convicted felon spam king writing columns about "Tips to Make Money on YouTube." The irony is so thick you could spread it on toast.

His fans, the "Bomber Squad" (naturally), show up at casinos to watch him pull levers in person. He claims 200 million views across platforms. He once hit a $1.08 million jackpot on Dragon Link at The Venetian, live on stream, and you can practically hear the algorithms salivating.

And look, I'll be honest: the business model is clever in the way all of Richter's schemes are clever. He found a niche audience of slot enthusiasts, many of them older women who find him "handsome" (their word, absolutely not mine, I cannot stress enough how much that is not mine), and built a parasocial relationship around the fantasy of watching someone else's money evaporate in a casino.

It's essentially his old spam empire business model: deliver dopamine to the maximum number of eyeballs. Except now people are watching voluntarily. Progress, I guess?

One profile noted that many women have shown interest in him "more for his money," leading Richter to describe his romantic prospects as "sugar-daddy seekers." Scott. Buddy. Brother. The women aren't the problem in this equation. The call is coming from inside the house.

Here's what fascinates me about Scott Richter, and why I think the story is worth telling again even though I'd rather be doing literally anything else: the hustle never changes. The medium changes. Email. MySpace. Domain registrars. Strip clubs. YouTube. But the fundamental approach is always the same. Find the platform. Find the angle. Flood the zone. Get sued. Reinvent. Repeat.

He's like a cockroach, and I mean that with all the admiration one can muster for a cockroach, which is to say, grudging acknowledgment of survival skills and absolutely nothing more.

His own website describes his career trajectory as evidence of "resilience and the ability to reinvent himself." Which is technically true in the same way that a guy who keeps getting kicked out of restaurants but always finds a new one is "resilient." In the same way that a rash that keeps coming back is "persistent." In the same way that mold is "adaptable."

The internet has a short memory. YouTube's algorithm doesn't care about ICANN terminations or Spitzer lawsuits or felony larceny pleas. It cares about watch time, and Scott Richter, whatever else you can say about him, knows how to keep people watching.

I just wish they knew what they were watching. Because I know what I'm watching. I've been watching it for twenty years. And the only thing that changes is the platform, the backwards cap, and the increasingly desperate need to be called Raja by strangers on the internet.

Scott, if you're reading this: I haven't seen you in fifteen years. It wasn't long enough.