Typically spammers work by themselves, or for some kind of organization that operates “underneath the radar” of the government, and this is for good reason. Professional spammers tend to be shady people who are engaging in shady online practices. However, it’s not often that we find a husband and wife couple who are operating a spam campaign. And of course, it’s even rarer to think that this married couple may have been at one time fully-qualified, working attorneys. But that is exactly the situation we have here in the case of known spammers Canter & Siegel.

Laurence A. Canter was born one June 24, 1953; his wife Martha S. Siegel had lived from April 9, 1943 to September 24, 2000. Judging by their age, in relation to the somewhat recent trend of online email spam as we know it, you wouldn’t take this couple to be your typical professional spammers – but then again, nothing is typical about their case.

On April 12, 1994, on behalf of their law firm posted what has come to be known as the first massive commercial Usenet spam. This was a message advertising their personal services as immigration lawyers and a sort of green card lottery they were supposedly operating; this has come to be known as the “Green Card Spam”, and it would put them at the center of controversy for quite some time to come.

To date, not much has come as a result of Canter & Siegel’s spam operations. The couple divorced in 1996, and Martha Siegel died in 2000. Laurence Canter currently runs a specialized web hosting company known as Host Milo Corporation