Sharon Lopatka had found many identities on Usenet: VHS interior decoration pitch-woman, author of love spells, and pornographic film scammer. Her final posts concerned wanting to find someone to torture her to death.

How conspiracy theory links the internet’s first spam (a series of randomly generated words with the subject line Markovian Parallax Denigrate) with a woman who posed as a CIA agent and was convicted of receiving funds from Saddam Hussein’s government.

An early 1995 peek at what happens when secretive groups meet the Internet: a Scientology Usenet group, populated by believers and critics, stirs conflict that results in raids.