According to former employees, the story starts in the Hughes Regency, an apartment complex in the less-than-tony Los Angeles suburb of Culver City where Penna, Osborn and Smith first set up shop. They eventually persuaded half of Website Results' 25 or so employees to rent units in the buildings, according to David Earnest, a salesman for Website Results from February 1999 until December 2000.

Penna and Osborn, avid bodybuilders, outfitted one of the two-bedroom apartments with thousands of dollars worth of professional weightlifting equipment, said Earnest.

"They worked out twice a day and ate nothing but protein. They're both built like Mack trucks," he said.

Penna, in particular, used his physique to intimidate employees on a regular basis, according to Owen Hindman, a programmer who resigned in April over what he called the trio's "shady" morals.

"During meetings, he loved to punch the wall right above somebody's head and tell them they were crap," said Hindman.

The three men ran the company like a cult, according to former employees, with most staffers routinely working 16-hour days without bonuses or overtime. Employees were afraid to openly question management, to blow the whistle or to quit.

At the time, Website Results was one of several companies engaged in the nascent business of "search engine optimization" (SEO).

The pitch to Web merchants and other traffic-hungry sites was that Website Results had a secret sauce for getting companies ranked highly by search engines such as AltaVista, Lycos, Webcrawler and the like. Using sleight-of-hand techniques such as "doorway pages" and "cloaking," Website Results was able to trick the search sites into listing clients at the top of search results.

Christina Wells, who became Website Result's first salesperson after answering a newspaper ad in 1999, said Website Results signed up blue-chip clients including Orvis, eBay, WebMD and ESPN.

"The SEO market was huge at the time, and when we went into light speed, my commissions should have been running upwards of $20K per month," said Wells. Instead, she said, the company reneged on the commission system and put salespeople on a flat monthly salary.

Web merchants, in a mad scramble for market share, had little time to look closely under the hood of Website Results' business. If they had, they might have detected a number of questionable practices.

"Our product was extremely virtual, so it was difficult for customers to verify what we were doing," said Steve Lazuka, who joined the company as its fourth employee in 1998 and served as vice president of operations for Website Results until leaving in February of 2002.

According to Lazuka, Website Results habitually submitted fraudulent invoices to its largest customers, inflating the amount of traffic it had delivered to their sites, in hopes that they would pay without looking too closely.

"They selectively picked out clients like eBay that had big budgets and paid their bills without tracking whether we really sent them the traffic," he said.

Garen Razoian, a software developer who was with the company for nine months in 1999, said he attended meetings at which company executives talked of sending such phony invoices.

"That's the kind of thing they were always considering, as if fraud was a normal way to do business," said Razoian.

To further pad its billable numbers, the company developed a software program, referred to as "The Zebra Project," that was designed to make it look as if lots of Web surfers had been clicking at search sites on hyperlinks that led to Website Results' customers' sites. Since many clients paid Website Results for delivering traffic on a "cost per click" basis, the automatic program helped to boost its revenue.

"It couldn't be detected. It went around clicking our clients' links with false traffic. They were stealing from and cheating our clients," said Lazuka.

Website Results also began buying "junk" traffic, such as the rights to replace the standard error pages at busy Web sites with its own. The rented "404 error" pages would redirect wayward surfers to designated customer sites, according to Earnest.

"It was totally untargeted and worthless traffic, but most customers had no idea," said Earnest.

Some clients, however, began to complain about the quality of the traffic delivered by Website Results.

Aron Benon, chief executive of Beverly Hills-based Florist.com, said he was cold-called by the marketing company around July of 2000 and agreed to hire it to drive traffic to his online flower shop.

"After they started sending me these big, fat bills for thousands of dollars, I went down to their offices and asked them to demonstrate what they were doing to bring people to our site. But they couldn't show me one search engine hit. It was all smoke and mirrors," said Benon.

Website Results officials later explained to Benon that they actually had purchased placement for his site at what they called an "up-and-coming search engine" named BestoftheWeb.com, run by Volton Technologies.

But when Benon checked the domain registration records for the site, he noticed that Volton's 3665 Hughes Avenue address was the same as that of Website Results' humble offices. Volton Technologies, it turns out, had been founded by Penna, Osborn and Smith one month before the sale of Website Results to 24/7 Real Media.

"That's when I decided they were totally bogus," said Benon, who reported that Website Results quickly consented to refund his payments.

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