I tried flattering Casper in my e-mails, gushing that he had astutely tapped into a timely and lucrative spamming niche. (You could probably find similar watches on the streets of Chinatown for $25, but hey, some people prefer the convenience of holiday shopping from home.) But Casper doesn't let just anyone join BlackMarketMoney.com. After I sent my introductory e-mail as "Chris Smith" from a free webmail account I had created, he asked to know the name of the person who had referred me to the site.

I told him I had learned about the program from a buddy in the #bulkers Internet relay chat (IRC) channel who uses the online handle Ep0ch. In fact, I had stumbled upon the home page for the watch spammers' affiliate program after studying some of their junk e-mails.

I noticed that the spams never actually advertised Royal-Replicas.com directly; instead, they enticed recipients to visit an intermediary domain on a Brazilian server that redirected traffic to the main Chinese site.

Last month, using a special look-up tool, I enumerated the domains stored on the Brazilian server. As I was studying the list, many of which use clever typos -- 0megas.net, Roiex.com, Ltalian.net -- one name jumped out: BlackMarketMoney.com. I surfed over to the site, which featured an image depicting bullet holes and wads of dollar bills. "It's easy money," proclaimed the graphic.

A sign at BlackMarketMoney.com said affiliates got paid up to 40 percent commissions for every order. In addition to pushing replica watches, the program would soon be adding "penis extenders," a cellphone charger and an online pharmacy to its portfolio of sites.

After spotting the member log-in panel in the upper right corner of the page, I decided to contact BlackMarketMoney.com and ask about joining.

Casper replied to my message saying he'd never heard of the #bulkers IRC channel or my friend Ep0ch. (Damn, he was good. Neither exists.) Casper said I needed to provide the name of a "big mailer" who could vouch for me.

I produced a list of names and addresses, assuming he would quickly detect that they were all bogus and he would ignore me. A couple of days went by and I still hadn't heard back. I'd pretty much abandoned hope of ever becoming a BlackMarketMoney.com affiliate.

That's when I decided to visit the unsubscribe page at a Royal-Replicas.com satellite site, and typed in the address of my most obscure e-mail account. (The address is unpublished, I rarely use it, and it only gets about 10 spams per day -- half for Royal-Replicas.com, and the rest for a generic Cialis site.)

My thinking was this. If the canary survived in the mine, I could cut spam to that account in half. If things went sour, I'd just jettison the e-mail address. (I decided not to unsubscribe any of my primary e-mail accounts -- the ones that get hundreds of spams every day for everything from fake watches to Hydrocodone without a prescription.)

A few days later, an e-mail arrived from Casper. He said I'd make "a valuable addition to the team." His message included information about how to log in to my account at BlackMarketMoney.com, and he gave me his AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) screen name in case I had any questions.

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