Spammer Alan Ralsky Indicted

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."

Really so bad?

I hate spammers as much as anyone, but,

"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?

It's fairly easy to blame the victim, until it's someone you know.
Admittedly, the cited scams seem fairly outlandish, but there are some quality hustlers out there.

Re:Really so bad?

A brief call for empathy is by no means half-witted.
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.

Re:Really so bad?

Theft of services.

-jcr

Re:Really so bad?

I have to pay for the connection to my ISP. My logged spam comes to a total of:

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.

Re:Really so bad?

I had a phishing scam email once that was so convincing I nearly clicked within it, thoughtlessly.
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.

Re:Really so bad?

How about installing rootkit software to do this? the botnet machines weren't exactly his.

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.

Re:Really so bad?

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.

Re:Really so bad?

Maybe they deserve to get screwed, but that doesn't mean that Ralsky deserves their money. A perp is a perp, even if his victim is an idiot.

-jcr

Re:Really so bad?

> I hate spammers as much as anyone, but...

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 .44 slug in their brainpan, but at least they had the nerve to go out and confront the people they wanted to fuck over. Ralsky sat on his bloated, porcine ass behind the safe glow of his monitors and zillions of layers of firewalls and he stole from us for years. He stole our time, our resources, our bandwidth, our security, our privacy, and our feeling of idealistic hope for the future of the net.

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?)

More details, DoJ docs, Spamhaus history etc.

There are some more links, including to the DoJ docs and some history here [wordtothewise.com].

Dear Alan Ralsky

Thousands of hot inmates are waiting for you!

Re:Dear Alan Ralsky

I wonder if his kernel is vulnerable to attacks.

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.

Re:Dear Alan Ralsky

Prison rape is a horrible thing, and references to PMITA prison and the like are in dreadful taste. You shouldn't joke about it unless you are willing to joke about, e.g. cancer.

"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.

Re:Dear Alan Ralsky

"Why did the cancer cross the road?
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.

Woohoo!

Thank God we caught that bastard! Now we don't have to worry about getting Spam anymore! Luckily for us, catching one spammer makes such a difference that we can all rest easy! It's not like there's a veritable army of Spammers waiting to pick up the slack once he's gone! It's a good thing this is headline news, it's really helping us make a difference!

It's about time!

This guy has been a pox on the net for years! Anyone remember that time a long time ago where he was getting so flagrant about it people started signing him up for datalogs, he was getting tons of them in the mail, and had the nerve to get angry about it?

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).

They don't deserve it... quick lesson in life

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/001863.html [census.gov]

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.

I can only conclude you're a bit on the young side if you believe the cure for being suckered is to become highly educated. Live a few more decades and you'll realize highbrows with PhDs are at least as easy to con as the plain folks who fix your car and take your trash away. Probably easier, actually, since the former's intellectual arrogance will blind them to the possibility that they might be fooled.

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.

Legit mail now an impurity

Spam has steadily increased on my server to where it is 98%+ of all mail. Virus mail is about 1% so real legitimate email is now less than one per cent of mail. Real mail is just an impurity in the spam stream.

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.

I have yet to see...

A conviction where the majority of the sentence came from the spamming law rather than all the other ones (fraud, laundering, etc). The spamming sentence seems to be just the icing on the cake, powerless to have any real effect on its own. It may be adding insult to injury to the criminal, but it's not what nails them in the first place.

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?

hooray!

because sometimes bad things happen to bad poeple.

In Soviet Russia...

In Soviet Russia, spam kills [slashdot.org] you [slashdot.org]

He'll walk with a slap on the wrist...

...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

who manages spam fighting systems in the largest organization in Hong Kong. The spam increased by tens of millions every month since August last year, mostly related to this 'stock spamming', you can see how difficult our days were; especially when a couple of them got past our multiple layers of spam controls and reached our top management, who believes no spam should be seen when they paid millions on spam fighting.

I know it's just tip of an iceberg, but this is surely a good news for us.

About fracking time

Ralsky's been documented spamming [spamhaus.org] for a long time. It's about time someone did something about him.

(That link has a pic.)

The most hopeful line of the story...

The three-year investigation was handled by the FBI, U.S. Postal Service and IRS Crimiminal Investigation.

If the investigation into this guy took three years before they could pull off an arrest, hopefully that means there are more ongoing spammer investigations in the pipelines that will lead to more arrests. We all know there are far to many other spammers out there for this one arrest to make a difference, but if this can lead towards bringing down some of the other big dogs out there, then maybe it will mean something.

What is SPAM?

This is almost as sad as AOL going after spammers. Those who have sent out 50 billion unsolicited discs. The companies are infinitely more despicable than any small cabal of spammers. So when will all the unsolicited junk from the large companies be defined as spam and spyware and malware?

Hang Him

From the highest post available to set an example.

Throw away the keys

I apologize if this sounds harsh. I think they ought to hang 'em high. Throw the book at this guy. Maybe use the same punishment for drug traffickers in South East Asia for this guy. This is the scum of the earth. He do not deserve any clemency. Dig a hole somewhere, a very-very deep one, drop him in all the the way to the molten earth core. Adios, farewell, goodbye!

As an email system administrator, I positively hate this kind of sub-humans. If I am to fall to the dark side of the force, this is it.

He must be thick, or greedy.

I'm sorry but if the business I was in was exceptionally borderline legal and I had been caught and prosecuted before, I would stop doing business in that business, period. He KNEW he faced a chance of having a major conviction but carried on anyway. Only reasons could be greed or stupidity.

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.

Ya know I thought it was odd...

Because I have only received about 10 spam mails in 24 hours, when my usual flow is between 200 and 500 spams a day (filtered, thank ghod)

I decided that some SPAM king must have been busted. So I checked /. and sure enough. Asshole #1 was caught.

Does that mean that most of my SPAM came from just that one guy?