EmailAppenders Owner Possibly a Fugitive

The man behind India-based Data Champions/Sloan Marketing—the company that seemingly operates or has operated under EmailAppenders and dozens of other aliases—may be wanted by U.S. authorities on 10-year-old immigration charges.

According to anti-spam blocklisting site Spamhaus, the owner of Data Champions/Sloan Marketing is a man named Subhakar “Sam” Surapaneni.

“Data Champions owner Subhakar ‘Sam’ Surapaneni appears to reside in the physical jurisdiction of India, probably Bangalore,” according to Spamhaus.org

In 1999, the Detroit News reported that Surapaneni was ordered to pay a $450,000 fine under a plea agreement after federal investigators found he had brought in dozens of immigrants from India under false claims and housed some in squalid conditions.

An immigration agent said 68 of the company’s 350 employees had false information on their visas, according to the report.

Also, federal investigators found 18 people living in a three-bedroom town house rented by the firm, the report said. Each paid the company $600 a month in rent, according to the report.

“Sleeping arrangements consisted of mattresses on the floor or a type of bed mat made up of blankets and sheets,” said agent Bernadette Cundiff of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, according to the Detroit News.

Peter Tangalos, the attorney who represented a group of Indian immigrants allegedly harmed by Surapaneni, verified there was a group of people crammed in a town house living in squalid conditions working for Surapaneni, but he couldn’t remember how many.

“He was bringing people in and not paying them,” alleged Tangalos. “He was making promises that jobs were available and they weren’t there.”

He added: “This guy’s a bad guy. The problem is he’s in India.”

Crain’s Detroit Business reported in November 2002 that an arrest warrant was issued for Surapaneni when the court learned he had fled to India.

Besides a $450,000 fine, the plea agreement reached on the immigration charges resulted in an order to pay restitution to the displaced immigrants and a sentence of six months in prison and three years probation, during which Surapaneni was to open his renamed company Zaconta’s books to the Whall Group, a turnaround and fraud-investigation firm, according to Crain’s.

Surapaneni reportedly failed to show up for a hearing that was scheduled after he violated his probation by not turning over financial information to The Whall Group.

Joseph Whall, president of the Whall Group, verified that Surapaneni failed to open his company’s books to him as required under the terms of his probation.

“All he had to do was comply with the court and I would have been in there for probably somewhere between six and 12 months and that would have been it,” said Whall. “Instead he said: ‘To hell with the judge, to hell with probation, to hell with monitoring, to hell with everybody.’”

Court records verify that in 2000 Surapaneni was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and three years of supervised release and that on October 1, 2002, Surapaneni failed to appear at a hearing regarding alleged violations of the terms of his supervised release.

“To this day, defendant Surapaneni has failed to appear,” said a court order filed in 2008.

“[U]nless defendant Surapaneni appears before the court by January 16, 2009, his $5,000 cash bond will be forfeited to the United States on that date,” said the order.

Court records indicate that the court clerk attempted to notify Surapaneni of the order by mail at an address in Michigan and that the letter was returned as undeliverable.

Meanwhile, a blog post written in third person by someone claiming to be Surapaneni references his brush with immigration authorities.

“After paying a $425,000 and serving a five-month community service sentence, he resumed his philanthropic and entrepreneurial work and moved base to India as he wanted to not get further into expensive litigation,” the person claiming to be Surapaneni wrote.

The blog post also claims Surapaneni is chairman and founder of Sales and Marketing Executives International’s (SMEI) India chapter.

Willis Turner, president and CEO of SMEI, said he was in India for the debut of its local chapter and there was no Subhakar Surapaneni at the launch event. He added there was a Stanley Rao there, however.

The person claiming to be Subhakar Surapaneni uses the middle name Rao on the blog. Turner added that no one named Surapaneni or Rao is currently associated with SMEI India.

The blog post also claims Surapaneni is founder of the Champions Trust charitable foundation, a group that claims on its site to be dedicated to helping orphans and handicapped kids. Searches on Google and Bing resulted in no outside references to Champions Trust headed by Surapaneni.

The searches did result in many references to Mittal Champions Trust, an organization dedicated to helping Indian athletes. The site’s executive team page makes no reference of Surapaneni.

Multiple attempts to contact Surapaneni using ChampionsTrust.org’s contact form resulted in error messages.

The blog post also claims Surapaneni founded Champions Society, an organization claiming to be dedicated to helping educate Indian children. Google and Bing searches for “Champions Society” brought back no outside references to the organization.

Multiple attempts to contact Surapaneni using ChampionsSociety.org’s contact form resulted in error messages.

An e-mail message sent yesterday to the address published on the site’s contact page was not answered.

If Spamhaus is correct that Surapaneni owns Data Champions/Sloan Marketing, it means he is tied to multiple shady e-mail list sales operations, including EmailAppenders.

EmailAppenders has been accused by several marketers of selling them bad data and failing to provide refunds.

Also, trade publisher Internet Retailer sued EmailAppenders last year alleging EmailAppenders was hawking a bogus list of Internet Retailer’s annual conference attendees.

Internet Retailer won a summary judgment in April when EmailAppenders failed to appear in court to defend itself.

EmailAppenders disappeared in May after briefly reappearing as eAppendersWeb.com.

According to Spamhaus, Data Champions/Sloan Marketing also operates or has operated under dozens of URLs, including OptinBuilders.com, OptinBuilders.biz, SixChannels.com, EmailAppenders.com and EmailAppenders.net.

Also according to Spamhaus, use of lists purchased from these firms has damaged the e-mail reputations of many businesses.

“Use of data (lists) purchased from Data Champions has hurt the reputations of many small businesses which [are] ignorant of the bad practices and outright fraud so common in the mailing biz,” says copy on Spamhaus’s listing of Data Champions.