Millionaire Within. E. Brian Rose

Both had auction sites at the time and both gave Mitnick the same treatment. Mitnick was somewhat of a celebrity in geek world, so it was no surprise the media grabbed a hold of this story.

      This was my opportunity!

      It didn’t take much searching to find a telephone number for Mitnick. I called him and offered DutchBid as a venue to run his auctions. His first concern was there was relatively no traffic at the site and barely fifty auction listings. I assured him that would not be the case, once he listed his items. In reality, I had no idea if the press would still be interested, but I painted a picture of the media swarming to cover the auctions. It worked.

      As a part of his release, the judge ordered that Mitnick could not touch a computer for five years, so all my future email communications were between Mitnick’s father and me (ya right). His “father” set up an account on DutchBid and listed the items. In addition to the items previously taken down by eBay, Mitnick listed several autographed bumper stickers with the slogan “Free Kevin”, which was the battle cry of fellow hackers during Mitnick’s incarceration.

      Immediately after the auctions were listed, I wrote a short press release that read:

       After being shut down by eBay, Yahoo and Amazon auctions, Kevin Mitnick’s genuine prison ID cards and other personal items are back on the auction block.

       This time at DutchBid.com.

       On Monday, eBay had pulled the auction of Kevin Mitnick’s Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate ID card, ending a flow of authentic Mitnick merchandise that was placed up for auction by Mitnick’s father. Kevin Mitnick is barred from using computers and accessing the web under the terms of his supervised prison release.

       Kevin Mitnick, who has been called a “computer terrorist” by the Department of Justice, is perhaps the most high-profile computer criminal to date.

       The official Kevin Mitnick web site claims that, “Kevin pursued his hacking as a means of satisfying his intellectual curiosity and applying Yankee ingenuity. These attributes are more frequently promoted rather than punished by society.”

       DutchBid founder and president Eric B. Rosenberg feels that that Mitnick memorabilia should be available to the public. He stated, “Whether you believe that Kevin is a criminal or a hero is irrelevant. The fact that the ‘big three’ auction sites would remove Mitnick memorabilia, but allow the auctioning of Nazi material is absurd. Kevin Mitnick’s personal items are certainly welcome at DutchBid.com.”

      I submitted that press release to PRweb.com and paid the small fee. Then, I did a search for all the news outlets, blogs, and opinionates that wrote about the Mitnick/eBay story online. I emailed a copy of the press release to each of the writers. After 24 hours, I was disappointed to only receive a call from one of them. It was a small online news site that I can’t even remember the name of. The reporter wanted an interview with Mitnick and me. Later that day, we had a three way call. I was asked three questions and the rest of the thirty minute call was spent questioning Mitnick. A few hours later, the interview was posted online. It was no swarm, but I was happy to have just one article written about my new site.

      That night, just as I was about to head off to bed, the phone rang. I thought, “Who could be calling me at two in the morning?” I almost didn’t answer. “Is this DutchBid.com,” said the female voice on the other line. I said yes. It was Kelly Yamanouchi, a reporter for the Associated Press, which was the biggest wire service at the time. She said she had a tight deadline, so she rushed through a few questions and quickly hung up. I went to bed.

      I woke up around 9am and turned my computer on. I had over 4,000 emails! Most of them were notifications of new registrations at DutchBid, but a lot of them were from reporters wanting an interview. I opened my browser to find out where the traffic was coming from. It was from all over the world! There were news articles being published about DutchBid in every language imaginable, although most of the traffic was coming from articles published in the United States.

      CNet.com wrote about my site. USA Today, CNN, The Register, The Chicago Tribune, US News & World Reports, and hundreds of other websites all published articles about DutchBid. Many of them are still online, just do a Google search for Kevin Mitnick and DutchBid and you’ll see them.

      I spent the next several hours calling back reporters and answering questions. They basically just wanted a quote from me, so I tried to change up what I said to each of them, while still giving the same answer.

      By the end of the day, a bidding war for Mitnick’s things was underway. It was amazing. One of his two ID cards was already in the thousands – the bidding barely reached a grand when eBay shut down their auction. Something even better was happening, too. People were listing new items on the site. In just 12 hours, over 500 new items were listed up for auction.

      This was all happening shortly after I filed my lawsuit against George. In the midst of the media storm, I received an email from him. It said, “Well done, you son of a bitch. Too bad I don’t have anybody working for me that was smart enough to think of this.” I liked getting that email. It was his way of giving me a pat on the back, despite our turmoil.

      Within a few days, over one million unique visitors had come to DutchBid. I knew these types of news stories have a short shelf life, so I started thinking about ways to keep the spotlight on the site. Clearly, many other small auction sites were taking notice. I thought this might be a chance to leverage the press I was getting and make a deal to merge with one of those companies.

      After a bit of searching, I found the perfect target. It was a site that had just announced they would be shutting down. You might ask why I would be interested in a company on their way out. It was their assets. The site, called Gold’s Auctions, had tens of thousands of registered users and about 100,000 items listed. That’s what I was after.

      I contacted the owners. Sure enough, they had seen the media frenzy surrounding DutchBid and the Mitnick auctions. They were impressed. Gold’s was pulling the plug on their site, because of debts they were unable to pay. Their bad decisions spelled opportunity for me. I made them an offer. It was a small offer that involved absolutely no upfront money. I didn’t have any money to give them. What I did have was the dream and I sold it to them. I offered them a small percentage of the company, in exchange for their members and listings. They accepted. We signed a letter of intent that same day.

      The following day, Gold’s sent an email to their members, alerting them that they would soon be transferred over to DutchBid. The response was tremendous. Thousands of members didn’t wait to be transferred, they came and registered on their own. CNet got word and their headline read, “Small Net Auction Company Goes for Gold”. This drew even more traffic to the site.

      A week later, a slight hiccup. The owners of Gold’s told me they were afraid to transfer the member base over to me for fear of violating their privacy policy and FTC regulations. My attorney assured them the way the deal was structured, it wasn’t a transfer – I was buying the company and merely changing software. They didn’t agree and, eventually, the deal went sour. CNet’s next headline was “Gold’s Merger a Tarnished Flop”. Witty.

      Despite the merger not coming to fruition, my site still received a lot of press and almost half of the Gold’s users registered for accounts on their own. They also started listing items in droves. The Mitnick story was still being reported all over the Internet and was still bringing in tons of traffic.

      I’d like to say this story ended with me making millions and eventually selling the company to some big corporation in Silicon Valley, but it didn’t. My web hosting company was billing me quarterly. Things were much different back in the year 2000. Bandwidth was super expensive. DutchBid was also built on the ColdFusion platform, which was the most expensive kind of hosting, at the time. When February rolled around, I received a call from my hosting company’s owner. He said he had never seen traffic like this and my server bill for January alone was $48,000. I nearly had a heart attack. I told him I didn’t have that kind of money, but what I did have was a fast growing cash cow that was starting to generate money.