The Russian Mafia Doesn't Like Spam Either 451
wattrlz writes "Apparently the current champion of v1*gr4 spamming solicited some of the wrong email boxes. Alexy Tolstokozhev was recently found murdered in his palatial spam-bought estate near Moscow. The implications of this hands on method of system administration are staggering." Update: 10/12 15:28 GMT by Z : Good story. Unfortunately, probably a fake.
That explains it (Score:5, Interesting)
I noticed a drop in spam over the past week and figured another big arrest had been made, which would be in the news. Well .. an arrest of sorts.
While I don't advocate the killing of spammers, it's hard to argue with results. What I do wonder is if this is a hit from a rival spammer. Where do we see evidence spam was sent to the wrong person? Begin notorious in Russia is a bit unhealthy, particularly when you have large amounts of money and no bodyguards.
From another source: [securitypronews.com]
To do that they'd probably need a supply of pills conventiently and discretely distributed.
BTW, here's the original source of the news [loonov.com]
Posted on October 11th, 2007 by admin and filed under Uncategorized.
Wow, just saw this on TV, so I decided to translate this story into English so my readers will be first to learn this. Sorry for mistakes in my English, I'm doing this in a hurry
Alexey Tolstokozhev (btw, in Russian his name means 'Thick Skin'), a Russian spammer, found murdered in his luxury house near Moscow. He has been shot several times with one bullet stuck in his head. According to authorities, this last head shot is a clear mark of russian hit men (known as "killers" in Russia).
Who hated Tolstokozhev so much as to hire a hit man to assasinate him? Well, I guess you have about one billion e-mail users to suspect. Tolstokozhev was a famous spammer who sent millions of e-mail promoting viagra, cialis, penis enlargement pills and other medications. Links in these e-mails usually led to some pharmacy shop, which paid Tolstokozhev a share of its revenue. This is a well known affiliate scheme employed by spammers worldwide.
Tolstokozhev is estimated to be responsible for up to 30% percent of all viagra and penis enlargement related spam.
In order to send millions and millions of unsolicited letters, Tolstokozhev employed a network of infected computers (so-called "botnet"), which he rented from hackers.
How profitable is spam? Well, the authorities say that Tolstokozhev has likely made more than $2 million in 2007 alone. (in comparison: average russian monthly salary is $400)
This is a second murder of a spammer in Russia. Another russian spammer, Vardan Kushnir, was assassinated in 2005.
"Violent murders is a clear sign that spam becomes a serious criminal activity" - the officials say. "Easy money attracts criminals, which bring their own version of "justice" with them."
Not the first time (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not the first time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Interesting)
That would be my take as well. This just rings of organized crime "moving in". You saw the same thing in the olden days when the rum runners were "consolidated" by guys like Al Calpone.
The message here is clear to all Russian online scammers; give us a cut or they'll be picking pieces of you off the floor.
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
This just rings of organized crime "moving in". You saw the same thing in the olden days when the rum runners were "consolidated" by guys like Al Calpone.
Probably just in eastern Europe. The American Mafia may be involved in prostitution, illegal waste disposal, drug running, bookmaking, extortion, and (of course) money laundering, but they are still a Family business with some standards.
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Interesting)
As for his "luxury palace", I'm not sure a one bedroom (two-room) apartment in a run-down district of Moscow qualifies. Granted, rent is probably as high in Moscow as in other capitals, but...
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently this guy sent out tons of spam inside Russia and managed to annoy too many people with the sheer volume, making a small fortune in the process.
Then he was found beaten to death. According to the Wired article I remember reading some time ago (link posted below) the people who killed him really took their time to make sure he suffered. No bullets are mentioned, although a lot of blood and a very sound kicking is. Then the police just swept the whole thing under the carpet.
I really would recommend that anyone who gets pissed off when they receive spam read the link the below. It cured me as I actually felt sorry for him by then end:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/spamking.html [wired.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Scientology, Spam, ripped of employees
No I don't feel sorry for him
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not the first time (Score:4, Interesting)
I really would recommend that anyone who gets pissed off when they receive spam read the link the below. It cured me as I actually felt sorry for him by then end:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/spamking.html [wired.com]
Who knows how biased the wired article is but from their profile he seemed to be an astonishingly self-centred person who didn't care about anyone else at all. I don't believe in the death penalty and thus don't endorse murder by a long shot, but there's many a murderer I've felt more sympathy for than this individual.
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7845&IBLOCK_ID=35 [exile.ru]
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Interesting)
Suppose a spammer sends 300 million spams in a campaign, and 10% reach people's inboxes. The average recipient takes 3 seconds to look at the subject line and delete the spam. The spammer runs 100 such campaigns a year. In total, in the course of one year that one spammer has wasted 285 person-years of other people's lives. If someone kills him, he's gotten off lucky compared to a punishment that would truly fit the crime.
A truly just punishment would be to torture him continuously, while using every known medical means to keep him alive indefinitely (as far beyond a normal human life span as possible). And even that wouldn't really do it, because it would probably just drive him (more) insane and catatonic in a few weeks or months.
Perhaps the appropriate form of torture would be the spam equivalent of the Ludovico Technique [wikipedia.org], but carried out for as long as the spammer can be kept alive.
Re:Not the first time (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
We are.
Some of us just take Spam Assassin [apache.org] a little too literally.
Oh, we are liberal all right (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay...
So wasting a bit of time deleting unwanted email is somehow equivalent to... torture? How do you figure that? How is that "just"? If you really think deleting spam from your inbox is somehow equivalent to being tortured continuously for "as far beyond a normal human life span as possible" then you must live a highly charmed life, indeed. Either that or your email client really, really sucks.
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not the first time (Score:4, Insightful)
So why do you think it is less bad for the spammer to waste 385 person-years distributed amongst many people?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Insightful)
At a rate of 1 email per second they could get through around 40k emails per day. You'd definitely think twice about spamming if your example 330 million emails equated to 20 years hard slog.
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Funny)
Well, of course.
They'd be so brain-dead by the end of their sentence that they could safely be disposed of in, say, the government.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
to commit the crime unhindered
Err... No. Read the original novel. It is so controversial that it is has not been reprinted for the last 15+ years so you need to dig through the library. I will provide some of the key points in order not to spoil it here and suggest you think again:
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So the next time I get stuck in a traffic jam for hours with thousands of other people because some poor bastard in a beat up el Camino knocked off on the freeway, I'm free to shoot him?
Huh? The "poor bastard" presumably wasn't trying to waste anyone's time, and in any case probably only wasted a few hundred or maybe a few thousand person-hours. That's orders of magnitude away from the damages deliberately inflicted on us by spammers.
why don't you go read the 8th Amendment of the US Constitution
I'm well aware of the Eighth Amendment. It's not clear to me that letting the punishment fit the crime is "cruel and unusual". The case law is mixed.
quote a few words out of your own hypocritical mouth
Get a grip. I suppose you thought Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" was serious?
I was pointing out
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Yep, best way imho would be 15 seconds of social services per email sent for spammers (= life) and fine those who buy things from spammers.
Death to all spammers is a close second, though
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Insightful)
Things like this are the natural result of civil authority failing to reflect the public's values. Most people want spammers stopped and very few ever even hear from law enforcement. Vigilantism always comes along to fill the gap.
I'm not at all sympathetic towards the dead dirty spammer. I sincerely hope they desicrated his corpse and put it on display as a warning to others. My only fear is that sooner or later an innocent will be killed in a case of mistaken identity. Due process and a fair trial are important.
As for the punishment fitting the crime, it's a tough judgement. Spammers willfully waste the time of millions of people daily and drive up costs for everyone. They are slowly rendering email useless. They have forced truly massive expendatures worldwide to upgrade mail servers just so they can keep up with their crap. I have to wonder how many children have received penis pill and sex toy spams?
beyond that, they pay other criminals to exploit millions of PCs to continue their harassment of the entire online world.
I don't know how many misdemeanors it should take to equal a capital offense but these guys are racking up a million a day.
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Interesting)
If someone were to bump into me as I walked along the sidewalk, it would be annoying, but ignorable. If he did it every day, I would become irritated, maybe even complain about him to authorities for assault and battery. But, if he did it several times a day, and the governments of the world failed to stop him from doing it, there would come a time when I would probably try to kill him.
Believe me, the thought of buying an international plane ticket and a weapon has crossed my mind many times.
Re:Not the first time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That explains it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That explains it (Score:5, Funny)
For spammers this may become known as Death by Natural Causes.
"That's odd I feel strangely different, there's a dead body in here and blood everywhere."
"YOU HAVE MAIL."
"Who are you? Do I know you, have we met?"
"I USUALLY MEET EVERYONE ONLY ONCE."
"Uh. Ooooohh...."
Re:That explains it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That explains it (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, it's pretty clear-- imagine telling Tony Soprano his dick is small! You would be lucky to get off with a quick shooting.
FAKE NEWS? (Score:5, Informative)
Looks faked. [avertlabs.com]
How sad.
Re:That explains it (Score:5, Funny)
What's one spam? Perhaps a slight annoyance, but nothing more.
What's one paper cut? Perhaps a slight annoyance, but nothing more.
Right, multiply both by many many million...
Re:Death Penalty (Score:4, Insightful)
Not so much.
In England around 1800, picking pockets was a capital crime. (As were more than 200 other offenses.) Yet, pickpockets routinely worked the crowds at public hangings. [ssrn.com]
Time was - back in the 1600s - in Russia, you could be summarily executed for possession of tobacco. Didn't stop people from smoking.
Executions, public or not, are not a significant deterrant.
Re:That explains it - vigilante justice (Score:4, Insightful)
That's true. That is why government must be effective at protecting the public. Otherwise, as the Founders of the U.S. noted, it is the right of the people to change their government.
Vigilantism is a horrible, frightening thing, and you have to ask yourself if you want to live in that kind of world. But, there comes a point, when someone has been abused enough, that vigilantism is the lesser of the evils.
We must have a way to tell people to stop that will make them stop.
Gives a whole new meaning... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gives a whole new meaning... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gives a whole new meaning... (Score:5, Funny)
real reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:real reason (Score:5, Insightful)
The Russian Mafia, like all such organisations, love sharing profits. In fact they love it so much, they'll come round from time to time to your place of business, for a friendly discussion about sharing profits and why it's a great thing to do.
I suspect the late spammer was not the sort of person who liked sharing profits, alas.
Oops (Score:5, Funny)
And this is good...why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And this is good...why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And this is good...why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, but "should" doesn't have the force of law everywhere.
They used to hang horse thieves, I hear -- interruption of someone's only means of communication. And that was for just one horse. Property is defended by force, whether or not that force is legal, because people will react emotively, not always rationally, to things that affect them directly.
So -- is an attack on your bandwidth, your personal inbox, annoying? Say that it is, for a few million people. What percentage of those people are not merely annoyed, but enraged? And of those, who with the will and the means will carry out a vengeful act?
The point is if you annoy enough people, you can expect common justice, rough or smooth.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
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Eh, one more to the pile of dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, some ass hole spammer is dead. Is it sad? Eh, it is sad in the way that anyone dying is sad, and well, people dying is not that sad. We manage to make it through each day cheerfully despite the massive amounts of death going on the world. So one guy who has made a name for himself by being a complete asshole is dead. It is hard to drum up any sort of negative feelings when plenty of completely good humans dropped dead within hours of his doing so and most people didn't shed a tear for them either.
Re: (Score:2)
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I think you will be hard pressed to find anyone who will openly claim that this is a justified killing.
However, considering the ruthless, invasive, and often times offensive and disturbing methods makes it unlikely that you will hear much public outrage. The products being pushed are base in nature and completely indiscriminant in the tact.
"advertisement" means to speak towards another person. This is not to be interpreted repeatedly sending 100's of emails a day to the same address on the same subject.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, let's not even look at the monetary cost that it imposes on servers handling the spam mails. Let's just look at the amount of actual *life* consumed. Let's say that it takes you 2 seconds to flag a spam as such and drop it in your spam box. That's 2 man-seconds. The numbers I see thrown around are that these spammers can send out upwards of 100 million spams per day. 2 man-seconds multiplied by 100 million per day com
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And this is good...why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And this is good...why? (Score:4, Interesting)
If only Google took on the project...
Re:And this is good...why? (Score:4, Funny)
Cause it only goes up to 5.
Lots of little crimes... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I should feel the same way.
However, I'm only slightly surprised to find that my conscience doesn't have any problem at all allowing me to feel happy at the news of this man's death.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The implications are staggering? (Score:5, Insightful)
Big mistake (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
D0 y0u H8te Spam? Send $1 to this account and it will go to a fund to Assassinate A spammer, and forward this to 5 friends..
And I could just see the "ki11 a spamm3r" e-mails mixed in with the penis boosting hot local singles with stock tips e-mails.
Cause for a Bullet (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's haul out the checklist! (Score:5, Funny)
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it, anywhere other than Russia
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, asshole! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
(X) THANK YOU! ONE DOWN. MANY MORE TO GO.
Re:Let's haul out the checklist! Q&A (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course it's also possible that he took an existing amusing checklist [craphound.com] and added the references to Russia to it because they're relevant to this particular story. You can work this out by any of the following methods:
a) Comparing the posted version to the original linked above.
b) Noticing that the additions were made in crayon.
c) Getting a sense of humour, or borrowing one from someone who isn't using theirs.
It's also possible that not every attempt at humour is a thinly veiled assault on the former Soviet Union.
Re:Let's haul out the checklist! Q&A (Score:5, Funny)
Big Prize? (Score:5, Funny)
Definitely should do. (Score:2)
Should press PREVIEW more often... (Score:2)
Fake Story? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you check the whois info on this site, it was created on October 11, 2007, today. Yet the site shows archives going back to February 2007? Archives which are "disabled' because of high traffic..
Next, if you search for both the name of the spammer, Alexey Tolstokozhev, or the site, loonov.com, you only get links pointing back to loonov.com as the originator of the story.
So it appears that this story is a fraud.
If so, perhaps it will inspire the reality. (Score:3, Funny)
If so, I would not be surprised if it inspired the real thing at some point in the near future.
Any bets?
Re:Fake Story? (Score:5, Informative)
CmdrTaco, are you there? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
One down, 199 to go. (Score:2)
OK -- well, at least they shouldn't say that I put them up to it.
BMFH (Score:2)
Simon [theregister.co.uk] would be proud.
More likely (Score:2)
Direct correlation (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, he wasn't murdered because of spam. He was murdered because he was a anuscluster who crossed the wrong people.
Though, I do think it would be wonderful if Don Boris' 18 year old nephew, who is also the "company's" sys-admin, came to him one day and said "Hey, you know what I want for my graduation present? {type type typitty type whois reverselookup tap-type-print} That snogmuffin off the Internet."
Spammer assasination story a fake! (Score:5, Informative)
http://loonov.com/russian-viagra-and-penis-enlargement-spammer-murdered.htm# [loonov.com]
Domain Name: LOONOV.COM
Registrar: ESTDOMAINS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.estdomains.com
Referral URL: http://www.estdomains.com/ [estdomains.com]
Name Server: NS0.HQHOST.NET
Name Server: NS1.HQHOST.NET
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 11-oct-2007
Creation Date: 11-oct-2007
Expiration Date: 11-oct-2008
Fake hoax information link
http://taint.org/2007/10/11/203243a.html [taint.org]
Domain loonov.com registered Oct 11th... FAKE!!!!
spamassassin? (Score:3, Funny)
The Russian mafia doesn't HAVE to like spam (Score:3, Funny)
No Russian news-source is mentioned (Score:4, Informative)
I must say this was a job well done by this bogus artist, he managed to spawn a classic slashdot dispute with many insightful posts, bravo! Well, maybe this will make spammers feel a bit uncomfortable...
Morale of the story: 10 thousand lemmings can be wrong.
looking like a hoax (Score:3, Informative)
Hoax, and Possible Malware Vector (Score:3, Insightful)
In Republic of Russia (Score:2, Funny)
Mafia conventiently and discretely deliver YOU!
Re: (Score:2)
Talk about poisoning the address pool!
Re:What is the deal with spam? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What is the deal with spam? (Score:4, Insightful)
I go to the USPS website and look up any address in the US. Does that mean I should send random people loads of crap they don't want? According to you, that's the fault of the USPS since the mail isn't traceable -- just like e-mail. E-mail was modeled after post: both are more or less untraceable. Just because e-mails are untraceable doesn't give others the right to abuse that.
Unsolicited paper mail, phone calls, or e-mail are all in the same category. They are rude, disrespectful annoyances. If you want to get that crap fine; in your case, the advertisements, spam, and phone calls at dinner time would be solicited.
To live in a free and peaceful society, people have to respect the privacy and rights of others. We should not purposefully annoy our neighbors or cause them harm. These are basic rules of social conduct.
I hope that I never have to be your neighbor. Your reckless disregard for the well-being, time, and privacy of others is shocking.
Re: (Score:2)
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Good luck in your upcoming 'swim while bound' challenge.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The "Bell Box" was essentially a computer, designed to accept anonymous wagers, cryptographically signed with an included public key, as to when, where, and how, someone would die.
The point was not really to wager on someone's death. No, the point was that very unpopular people would have such a large pool of small wagers accumulated, that at some point, the risk of getting caught for the murder would be perceived to be less than the payoff for predicting the exact ci