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Spammer Alan Ralsky Indicted
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Jan 03, 2008 09:23 PM
from the dont-flee-to-nigeria dept.
from the dont-flee-to-nigeria dept.
Several users have written to tell us that notorious spammer Alan Ralsky has been indicted along with ten others on 41 counts of spam-related illegal activity. Ralsky has had trouble with the law in the past, and the current litany of charges includes mail and wire fraud, money laundering, conspiracy, and violation of federal spamming laws. From the Detroit Free Press:
"The 41-count indictment said Ralsky ... and others used unsolicited e-mail to pump up the price of largely worthless stock in Chinese companies and sold the stock reaping huge profits and leaving Internet subscribers who purchased it holding the bag. The operation also used illegal methods to maximize the amount of spam that could be sent while evading spam-blocking devices and tricked recipients into opening and acting on advertisements, prosecutors said."
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Your Rights Online: Alan Ralsky Gripes About Can Spam Act 706 comments
fdiskne1 writes "The New York Times has an interview with Alan Ralsky, commonly known as the world's worst spammer. CNet News.com is running the same interview. Ralsky admits using open relays and virus-infected PCs and not honoring unsubscribe lists. He complains about having to comply with the new CAN-SPAM law will cost him an additional $3000 in costs to set up a genuine opt-out list. Anyone here feel sorry for him? Okay, I'm biased, but I can't wait until we see him in prison."
[+]
FBI Raids Home of Spam King Alan Ralsky 422 comments
wstearns writes "The Detroit News is reporting that the FBI has raided Alan Ralsky's home. In the raid, the FBI took computers and financial records, effectively shutting him down. Mr. Ralsky has been frequently covered here."
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Really so bad? (Score:2, Insightful)
"used unsolicited e-mail to pump up the price of largely worthless stock in Chinese companies and sold the stock reaping huge profits and leaving Internet subscribers who purchased it holding the bag"
almost seems like a public service. If you are stupid enough to buy stock in a company, especially a foreign company, based on unsolicited e-mail you received, you deserve to get screwed.
Re:Really so bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Admittedly, the cited scams seem fairly outlandish, but there are some quality hustlers out there.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have not read the indictment yet, but it might not be a pure confidence trick.
What we have seen with a lot of recent pump and dump schemes is that the scammers send out some pump spam, then quickly buy some stock themselves, then they then they buy lots more stock from other people's stock broking accounts that they have bought phished cr
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Spamming is theft, and any company involved in it is not legit, by definition.
-jcr
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Re:Really so bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
-jcr
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
- theft of energy
- theft of other resources
If it wouldn't be for spam I could probably run my email in the corner of some small machine, because of spam we've had to upgrade our server, just rejecting all those messages (thanks SpamHaus !!) takes up quite a bit of effort.
For every spam message sent that makes it through all the filtering that effort goes up because at a minimum it takes several seconds to delete the spam.
Multiply that by several hundreds of millions of spam messages sent ever
Re:Really so bad? (Score:5, Informative)
566,357,862 bytes - from spam sent to my old email address and my replacement email address, plus an additional
104,489,930 bytes - from the email address I abandoned as all it receives is spam, but I keep alive for anywhere that I don't trust and requires an email address; I emptied it last night of 9755 messages (received between 20/07/06 and 08/01/07 [9651] and 104 yesterday after I had emptied it) - I just let it fill and then bounce - and have just checked it now. Over the last 14 hours it has received 445 messages with a total of 1,494,616 bytes
2,344,115 bytes - from 730 spam received this year (over the last 83 hours) at my current email address
So at least 674,686,523 bytes, or 658,873K, or 643M (= 674M as per HD manufacturers) of spam has been received since my email address first got leaked. In consideration that my first PC came with a HD of 525M, the amount of spam I have received would have filled that and more!
I've only recently converted to broadband; prior to that I was on 56K dial-up. So, assuming about 350,000,000 bytes of spam were received during that period, about 62500 seconds or 1041 minutes or 17 hours have been wasted, and I've had to pay for each and every second of that - that amounts to theft of quite a bit of money. Similarly, theft of my current bandwidth would come to quite a pretty penny as well, just a bit smaller.
Before suggesting spam filters, I'd just like to point out a couple of facts:
1) I do have spam filters in place - they divert 99.9999% spam accurately so I never see it in my Inbox
2) They hide the problem, not solve it - spammers will try harder to get through, changing messages and sending more of them.
My spam filters log results: eg last year, spam started off at about 1300 messages/month for Jan and Feb, increased to about 2000/month for most of the year, then about 3000 for Sep and Oct, then 5247 for Nov and 7267 for Dec. Obviously, spam filters were getting better somewhere and so the spammers tried another tact - change the style of the spam and increase it. However, I've also noticed that over the years spam seems to increase vaguely exponentionally, suggesting that my email address started off on one list, then after a while, ended up on another, following a kind of fibonnacci series for the number of lists on which it exists - even my "spam-trap" email address is still being traded and put on more lists by the look of it.
There is also the theft of the Zombie PC owner's ISP connection bandwidth, not to mention the power required to execute the mailing; along with breach of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (in the UK at least).
And as others have mentioned - there's the theft of the time to deal with the incoming spam: the time spent dealing with spam (whether by hacking filters, or manually deleting them) which can never be recovered.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
At one time there were interminable arguments as to the definition of 'spam'. There were grey areas. ... When spam was first recognized as a problem there were plenty of people who were setting themselves up as the supreme arbiters of where exactly the line should be drawn and threatening 'zero-tollerance' of anyone who refused to comply with their demands. They were a bunch of self appointed little-Hittlers. It wasn't about stopping spam anymore, it was about projecting their control and authority.
This is flatly wrong. Nobody actually WANTS mass-emailed advertisements in their inbox. In the past, relatively large corporations would send spam for their products ex. HP advertising a new desktop, and say it wasn't spam. They were wrong, as ISP sysops quickly informed them. Eventually, spam became a big enough problem on their networks that ISP sysops brought the ban hammer down in the form of blacklists and other tools.
The "little Hitlers" you're talking about are the sysops who wanted the spammers to
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When someone starts sucking up entire accounting firms and multiple banks into your scam, maybe, just maybe, fraud is about more than suckering stupid people. See also: Enron.
Re:Really so bad? (Score:4, Funny)
However, the fact that you have a "most humble opinion", yet no sack to reveal your userID, _and_ managed an Insightful mod, underscores your point completely.
Parent
Re:Really so bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then I thought, no, I should log into the service's website directly, and see WTF.
That was a close call.
As for you, one hopes that your unbeaten streak is never tarnished. May you also never screw up while trying to pay a bill and get a blemish on your credit report, never get in a fender-bender due to exhaustion, and never have that critical piece of paper with the essential information scribbled on it slip from the wallet, at least while that good friend is around.
And, should the good friend detect you having an encounter with mortality, may they handle it more graciously than you did theirs.
Parent
Re:Really so bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also Ralsky has done a lot more than just this. I cringe from the bad memories after he convinced a former employer of mine that spamming animal porn was a great way to make money.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Oh, but it is! It really is!
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That's rubbish. It might be a good way, but no way is it a great way.
Re:Really so bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
Surprisingly well actually. I list Leo Kuvayev's [spamhaus.org] former company "2K Services" as a credit card processing company (the job I was hired for). When they ask why I left I tell them he changed his business model to something I couldn't participate in and still have a conscience. If they ask for details I tell them everything and I reap the scored sympathy points for having the worst job experience imaginable.
For the record I spent several weeks trying to change his mind then turned down a raise and left the company several months before his new business model forced a national carrier to change their policy on spam and cut his fibre optic connection which was exactly what I warned him they would do when I gave him my contractually required two weeks notice.
Parent
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Re:Really so bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
-jcr
Parent
Re:Really so bad? (Score:5, Funny)
Not as much as me, you don't. I want Ralsky imprisoned, beaten, chained, ass-raped on a daily basis, shivved, shanked, stabbed, tear-gassed, napalmed, face-raped, cock-punched and sodomized by the most massive, cruel, heartless, multiple-STD-carrying maniac convicts that a shitty B-grade prison movie could invent. For years that fat fuck has willingly and gleefully shit all over my inbox, my servers, and the net in general knowing all the while that not a single goddamned person on earth was interested in what he was selling unless they were certifiably ripe for scamming or being conned. I'll give a tiny amount of begrudging credit to someone who has the brass ones to take a pipe or a gun and rip off a convenience store. They're shit and they should die with a
Seriously. Fuck that guy...
(I'm posting late and drunk, so if you're somehow related to law enforcement, consider this my disclaimer of any wish to actually have any of that stuff up there come true. If you're a convict with rabies, herpes, and a rare form of airborne contagious cancer, I have a few bucks with your name on it if... well, you know. Stuff happens, donnit?)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For 'inconvenience you'. read 'inconvenience hundreds of millions of people several times a day for over a decade'. Ralsky's a career spammer and has been at it for donkey's years.
If you accidentally stepped on my foot I'd maybe be annoyed. If you deliberately stepped on my foot I'd punch you in the face. If you built a machine capable of steppi
More details, DoJ docs, Spamhaus history etc. (Score:5, Informative)
Dear Alan Ralsky (Score:5, Funny)
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Once they have access to the physical box, all bets are off.
Re:Dear Alan Ralsky (Score:5, Funny)
He needs to REST after dropping the SOAP, then maybe he'll get a little java for his efforts.
Let's hope the attacker uses a firewall.
Ok, ok. This is a classic example of Taking A Joke Too Far.
Parent
Re:Dear Alan Ralsky (Score:4, Funny)
"Ironically, both spam and resulting sentence saved Ralsky's life, as his cellmate and former customer discovered a polyp, nine inches up."
Unless you think that's funny, please treat treat this problem with the gravity it deserves.
Parent
Re:Dear Alan Ralsky (Score:4, Interesting)
To metastasize."
Since when does taste matter when telling jokes on an anonymous forum, far away from anyone who could be offended (maybe not very far, but how would you know)? Save that formality for the meatspace.
People tend to distance themselves from the subject; it's not like people crowd around some poor soul being raped at knifepoint, nor would many of the people flinging around holocaust jokes bust a gut when shown a video about WW2 concentration camps.
Parent
Woohoo! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
200 Known Spam Operations responsible for 80% of your spam.
80% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe can be traced via aliases and addresses, redirects, hosting locations of sites and domains, to a hard-core group of around 200 known spam operations ("spam gangs"), almost all of whom are listed in the ROKSO database.
http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso [spamhaus.org]
The US government is pretty much worthless, they frittered for years with little good effect until this day.
Maybe things are improving, somehow.
Re: (Score:2)
vigilante justice FTW!
I hate spam not in a can.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And I'd say the bulk of it is from a much shorter list. Looking at one hour of spam recorded by Abuse Butler, the most common 100 domains advertised in spam were
39 different domains for Elite Herbal/Express Herbal/Megadik/VPXL (allegedly spammed by Shane Atkinson) -- and this does not take into account multiple different spams for the same domain, a typical pattern with this spam brand
15 domains that were duplicates of the same domains above,
It's about time! (Score:5, Interesting)
This guy deserves everything he gets. Maybe he'll luck out and his cellmate will have responded to some of those penis pill spams.
(I hate prison rape references as a matter of principle, but here's a guy that I really have a hard time mustering up *too* much sympathy for).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So much for principle then. I'm sorry, this is very off topic, but it really disturbs me when people state their principles only to deviate from them a second later. You don't get the bragging right for politically correct principles if you intend to BREAK them. You get them when you stay on your principle no matter what.
This is happening a lot lately with freedom of
They don't deserve it... quick lesson in life (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the link for my statistics, just so you know I'm not pulling numbers wildly out of my ass.
Fact is, most people in the US just aren't educated enough to recognize a scam. Look at the earning income and imagine their lives and how desperate one can get. Why do you think those damn AMWAY scams work so well. Promises of a better income for less than well off people.
Notice how I'm not saying stupid people. Just not educated for whatever reason. Most of the people that read slashdot are VERY tech knowledgeable. We grew up with this. Most of the people who get conned, didn't.
Whether they were too poor to afford a home computer and internet access, or were ahead of the technical wave... it doesn't matter. Remember, the internet hasn't been around that long in comparison to everything else. In the past 30 years, we've advanced more than we have in 300 years. Some people simply cannot keep up or get confused and don't try.
It's always easier to be ignorant than try to learn. Look at the statistics in the link I gave you. 27% of the people in the US over the age of 25 have a college degree (This is Bachelors, PHD, Masters, Associates... etc). I bet about 90% of slashdot readers has a college degree of some kind.
So it's suddenly surprising to you that with all this technology and most of the people not growing up with the technology, we have a lot of VERY uneducated people that are easily scammed?
I'm not excusing their behavior, and the fact that they fell for something that was too good to be true, means they fell into two categories
1) Greedy
2) Desperate
Otherwise, you typically don't fall for things like that. Just remember that you are in the top echelon of educated people in the US. What's easy for you to understand and grasp isn't for them. But that doesn't make it okay for trash like this to exploit them. In fact it means that they are the worst kind of trash and low life who KNOWINGLY did it again and again and again.
I have no remorse for any punishment they get. I personally hope they go to prison and meet one of the people whos' lives they ruined financial... who then turned to crime to survive because they didn't know better.
Goodness are you naive. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, the scams intellectuals fall for -- dot-com stock, "flipping" hot Bay Area real estate with subprime mortgage money, socialism, etc. -- tend to be more complex and dazzling then the ol' ATM switcheroo or Nigerian bank fraud. And, since well-spoken intellectuals control the narrative, we tend to laugh at the fools taken in by penis pills while we "smart" people smugly shop for micronutrients, dehydrated horse piss and extracts of Chinese weeds at the organic food store to ward off cancer. Ha ha indeed.
A susceptibility to being conned is part of your character, not a function of your intelligence or education. It's a question of whether you tend to think you know more than you really do, and are willing to make assumptions not backed up by data.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Speak for yourself mate. Some of us got wise to that nonsense a long time and spend a lot of time trying to disabuse other folks of the notion that there's anything to these mystical, pseudo scientific lies.
(By the way, whilst I don't care for "chinese weeds" to "ward off cancer", organic food has recently been shown in a proper scientific study by the EU to co
Legit mail now an impurity (Score:5, Interesting)
It's crazy and it keeps increasing month after month. It has cost my company thousands of dollars in equipment, tech support and other manpower costs, lost business, and user bad-will for delayed or filtered mail. When you spread that around to all the other mail systems out there, it is clear that spammers have been doing some real damage.
When someone does catch one, they should go medieval on them. In our enlightened times this means mega-fines and long jail terms in the worst prisons that can be found but honestly I would not be bothered by putting their heads on pikes as an example for what happens when you screw over millions of people.
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I have yet to see... (Score:5, Insightful)
The obvious problem with that is that the current system can only deal with people who commit other crimes while spamming, and while a lot certainly do, there are many spammers that don't break these laws and thus get away with the spam itself. Not to mention that proving something like money laundering is MUCH harder for the prosecution than proving spamming.
Y'all Slashdotters complain that the the laws which do and shouldn't (or don't and should) get passed/enforced are because of evil greedy corporations pulling the politicians' strings. Well, here's a question for you. EVERYONE hates spammers (other than spammers themselves). End users like you and me who already got offered to enlarge their penises so often that you could make a space elevator out of one, large corporations whose trademarks get infringed on with fake v14gr4 and bring bad reputation, businesses who lose hundreds of manhours digging through spam in their inboxes, ISPs who's bandwidth gets clogged up (and thus the subscribers of those ISPs as well)... Just about everyone, rich or poor, peon or king, hates spam, and large corporations are as eager as end users to get their governments to do something about it. It's a rare case when nobody is trying to sabotage each other, and everyone has the same goal - stamp out spam.
YET SPAM KEEPS GROWING BIGGER EVERY DAY, AND NOTHING GETS DONE. As I previously described, the current anti-spam laws are a joke when it comes to enforcement, and are only applied to people who get convicted on so many other counts they won't even feel this final punch.
My question is... WHY?
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YET SPAM KEEPS GROWING BIGGER EVERY DAY, AND NOTHING GETS DONE. As I previously described, the current anti-spam laws are a joke when it comes to enforcement, and are only a
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This is a very common legal outcome. Common law offenses and violations of settled law are much more likely to result in prosecutions and convictions than violations of more recent legislation. Look at the Plame case for example- a law specifically tailored for that situation (the Intelligence Identities Protection Act) had been quite precisely violated, but since one of the ele
hooray! (Score:4, Funny)
In Soviet Russia... (Score:2, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, spam kills [slashdot.org] you [slashdot.org]
He'll walk with a slap on the wrist... (Score:5, Insightful)
...or so I predict. The maximum fines are but a tiny fraction of his monthly income. The jail terms aren't a threat given overcrowded prisons, the focus on the farcial War on Drugs (TM), the classification of this as a "white-collar" crime, and the technical illiteracy of both juries and judges when it comes to spam. Not to mention that Ralsky is easily smart enough to have planned for this and no doubt has plenty of high-priced legal talent at his disposal -- plus, I wouldn't doubt, a carefully maintained stash of information on other spammers that he can use to plea-bargain his way out of much of this.
All that remains is a book deal and eventual appearances on cable news networks as "a spam expert". Oh, and he might have to "retire" from spamming in the same way that Spamford "retired" -- by moving on to junk faxing, spyware and typosquatting.
I'm one of the victim (Score:3, Interesting)
I know it's just tip of an iceberg, but this is surely a good news for us.
He must be thick, or greedy. (Score:3, Interesting)
To make him look even more stupid, this guy is a multi millionaire. It's not like he couldn't retire and just live a nice life investing his money and living off the interest.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What I want is an option to opt out of *all* unsolicited junk mail, especially anything that is marked "To Resident". Imagine how many trees would be saved!!!
Its there if you actually try to find it, instead of just whining about it. The biggest difference between e-mail spam and junk mail is that you can usually opt out of junk mail, but trying to opt out of spam is likely to just get you marked as a "live fish" and put on the "spam faster" list.
For pre-approved credit cards: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/ [optoutprescreen.com]
Other opt-out info: http://clarkhoward.com/advice/toss_telemarketers.html [clarkhoward.com]