Russia's Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered

Karellen !-P writes "Vardan Kushnir, a notorious russian spammer who headed the English learning centers, the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head."

Dying in tiny slices

[TapestryDude]

I remember reading about how Steve Jobs motivated the original Mac team to speed up the boot. "Millions of people will boot their Macs every day; if you can shave 30 seconds off that boot time, it's the equivalent of three human lives every day". If that concept is true (debatable, but stick with me) then spammers, in the aggregate, are killing dozens or even hundreds of people a day ... a few seconds here and a few seconds there. So, in this respect, what goes around comes around.

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[AKAImBatman]

I have a feeling that this has less to do with his spamming efforts and more to do with the mafia. From what I understand, a lot of spammers, script kiddies, and crackers in Russia have connections to the mob. The reason for this is that the mafia tends to use cyber-warfare (such as DDOSes) for blackmail, and spam for revenue generation. Apparently the spam networks are quite sophisticated, with one person finding and validating addresses then selling them to the highest bidder.

In other words, things may be more complex then they seem...

It has begun...

[cfsmp3]

Don't know if it's true, but honestly, I can't believe it took so long.

The very same probability laws spammers use to find people stupid enough to buy from them, apply here as well: If you annoy millions every day, sooner or later you'll find someone crazy enough to go kill you.

Of course it isnt moral.

[elucido]

The majority of people don't care about morals and do not have empathy. We live in a morally insane world, wake up. It's simple, if you piss off a lot of people, carry a gun at all times, hire security, get a vest. If you want a job like "spammer" you can expect to attract a lot of violent people. I think the risks of that job were predictable, I feel sorry for the guy who was killed because I have empathy, but I will not assume the person who killed him did. So the fact is, hes been killed, the person who did it got away with it, and this cannot be allowed, they must be caught to save the spamming industry. The last thing you want is for murder to be logical enough that people can get away with murdering spammers, or anyone. Murder should mean life sentence. Instead of filling the jails with marijuana drug dealers we should be putting the violent rapists and murderers in jail, but I guess selling drugs is a bigger concern, we wouldnt want kids smoking marijuana.

Re:Spam mob?

[ScentCone]

Any chance there's some sort of Russian Spam mob going on?

There's zero chance that there's not a relationship between Russian-based spam and their thriving organized crime culture. Those guys are completely in bed with each other, which also means that when you make a mis-step, you get your skull beaten with whatever is the Russian equivalent of a baseball bat. Do they play cricket, there, or what? Probably a hockey stick.

To all those that think killing spmmers is great

[DrSkwid]

If you posted on /. that spammers should die, I guess you can now consider yourself a suspect.

And if you are a UK resident you can thank your lucky stars that the Extradition Act 2003 means that the Russian Police don't even need to build a strong case :

In Category 2 cases the court may need to be satisfied that there is sufficient evidence produced to show a prima facie case. However, many territories, including the US, Russia and Israel, have been designated so that they do not need to provide evidence, but instead only have to give information. It is significant that when the UK requests extradition from the US it is still required to show 'probable cause' - a diplomatic struggle the UK appears to have lost. The basis for this change of status of the US is the extradition treaty signed in March 2003. This generated a large amount of controversy as the treaty was signed without any Parliamentary scrutiny and the text was not even made public until two months after the signing.

Need your ISP's logs, no problem :

The police have acquired additional powers ancillary to extradition requests enabling them to obtain search-and-seizure warrants and production orders. Either of these measures could be used to secure material from third parties including corporations.

http://www.legal500.com/devs/uk/fr/ukfr_018.htm [legal500.com]

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[Frumious Wombat]

Another day on the froniers of capitalism.

About 10 years ago (and if it's a lot better there now, sorry for outdated information), the NY Times had two articles summing up the new Russia.

One was on business practices, with the comment, "to enforce a contract, you often have to take out a contract".

The other was on a clinic doing heroin detox. The basic system was thugs would patrol the streets, find people doing heroin, club them into submission, drag them to the clinic and chain them to a bed, and then let them dry out cold turkey. The Doctor in charge said, "of course this is not the optimal treatment, but here ... ".

Looks like our spammer's fate falls under one of those two categories of "solutions". As others have said, it probably wasn't the spam, it was, "just business".

Gives me the shivers...

[Spy der Mann]

I both pity the guy (and pray thate he will reach purgatory at least) and at the same time, am afraid of the people behind the murder. I mean, if someone we consider a villain was murdered, then it means he was only a pawn of a much greater power :-S

As they say, you never know who you work for.

Re:You know what they say...

[Linus Torvaalds]

This is retribution and murder

Retribution? Do you know something that the authorities don't?

has fuck all to do with Karma

Karma [wikipedia.org]: According to the Vedas, if we sow goodness, we will reap goodness; if we sow evil, we will reap evil.

If you add up all the hours people spend deleting spam, filtering spam, missing important emails because of spam filters etc, then that's a hell of a lot of time this spammer has taken away from people. You take away somebody's time, you are taking away part of their life. I'd say that's sowing evil, wouldn't you?

This is one less person that can have his day in court

Spamming is legal in Russia.

Re:Why would it be the mafia?

[Artfldgr]

russian mob is not the same as the italian or other mobs... first of all its top heavy with phd's!!! engineers, programmers, chemists, etc... what the hell do you think happens when you have a disenfranchised highly intelligent group? duh.. its one thign to disenfranchise the poor and stupid.. antoher to do it to the people that are smart... no they would beat the shit out of him and leave him as a message... no reason to hide it, or anythign... its out in the open.. and the person who was to get the message surely got it.. probably lack of pay off, or threat of cooperation... done deal after that

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[AJWM]

Last (okay, only) time I was in the Soviet Union (not long before the end), there was at least McDonalds, Baskin-Robbins, and Pizza Gut (there's no letter 'H' in Cyrillic).

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[ucahg]

Murder is clearly a disproportional response but you shouldn't be surprised when people are happy to see a sociopath take it worse than he was giving out.

Can I still be disgusted?

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[chris_mahan]

let me put human death in perspective:
6 billion people here. There will be 6 billion deaths in the next 60 years (check avg life expectancy.
That runs to 100 million per year.
that mean roughly 275,000 deaths per day.

Now, if this guy was a mafioso, involved in spamming people all over the world, costing the global economy billions annually in lost productivity...

Don't feel so bad for him.

Yesterday, did you think of those 275,000 deaths? Are you going to think about the 275,000 deaths tomorrow? Then don't cry too much over this one.

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[theefer]

Why is it modded funny? I also went to a Subway in Saint-Petersburg on Nevsky Prospect; there are definitely a lot of american fastfoods in Russia nowadays. One of the few places where some of the cashiers speak english actually -- which made us prefer the aventure of typical russian restaurants with no ways to communicate with the waitress.

Re:Sure there is...

[AKAImBatman]

Except that the letter "H" is not the letter "H". It's the letter "En". (Letter names in Cyrillic are phonetic, except for the "silent" modifiers like E-Kratkoy.)

My personal favorite transliteration is the conversion of "J" (which exists neither as a sound or a similar character) to the letter "Zsa". I always loved how my wife said my name, right up to the point where she developed an American accent. :-)

Re:Sure there is...

[NotoriousQ]

I do not know what people are talking about. Russian most certainly has an h. The letter is 'ha' and is written like 'X'. And it is not as strong as people claim it is. Most certainly does not warrant a KH spelling. I do not know how "pizza hut" is spelled in russia, but I will guess that they do not spell it like "picca gat", as the the second word would sound too close to a russian equivalent of "asshole" (person, not actual object).

A good transliteration of j would be 'd''zh' (stupid slashdot does not allow cyrillic easily), and is actually a good approximation of the sound.

Your "zsa" would most likely be transliterated 'zh'. So if your name is something like Jean, your wife was probably pronouncing it like you would pronounce djinn.

And if you want more fun things about cyrillic, how about the difference between 'sh' and 'shch', completely undetectable to most english speakers.
Or the letter 'y', which apparently takes much practice for most english speakers, who just can not figure out how to make that sound lengthy (they can manage it if it is incredibly short).

Sigh. On the other hand, I know too many russians who can not make out the 'th' sound, even though they spoke english for 10+ years. Sigh. "Srifty Srursday" instead of "thrifty thursday" at gas stations. *shudder*

Re:Why would it be the mafia?

[jimbolauski]

Not to mention that the probablity of getting arrested in Russia is far less then in the United States or elsewhere so there's no reason to send in "The Wolf" to clean up the mess. If the spam is still flowing after a couple of weeks we'll know he was made an offer and refused it. If the spam stops I think the baseball bat might be the latest is antispam protection.

Moscow is not Russia

[Wyatt Earp]

While Moscow is booming, a little slowed because of the Asian Economic problems and over all cool down in the World Economy, Russia isn't booming.

So the region is becoming what it was 600 years ago, City-States and the hinterlands they "control".

Moscow exerts control over oil, gas, aerospace technology and timber outside of Moscow while they are stimied in Chechnya by a small, small force which is costing them thousands of soldiers and alot of equipment.

Russia, I've heard as a whole is about 100 years behind Europe and the Americas.

Re:Why would it be the mafia?

[ocbwilg]

The mafia wouldnt beat a person to death, they'd simple make the person vanish off the face of the earth. You'd think the mafia would do a professional hit.

No they wouldn't. When organized crime wants to send a message, they don't do it quietly. Who knows what this guy was into, but if he was Russia's most profitable spammer then he was either heavily involved in organized crime or competing with organized crime. Either way, it would be awfully easy to piss off someone who might decide to make an example out of you.

What I find far more interesting is that he was Russia's most successful spammer and he still lived in an apartment.

Re:Why would it be the mafia?

[droptone]

Simply making someone disappear doesn't send the kind of shock like seeing someone else's brutally mangled body and knowing that that could be you if you decide to screw around with the perpetrator.

Depends on if this was done by the actual, and extremely organized, Russian mafia or just some thugs. I have to say the thought that people who annoy an organization just disappearing is frightening. Gulags anyone? The more organized sort of Mafia's do not have to make a spectical to show people their power. It's only the up-and-coming groups that try to be extremely brutal. Once a group has control they want as little publicity as possible.

Numbers, and points to ponder

[Thaelon]

I seriously doubt this guy was killed just for spamming, but let's assume he was for discussion. While on the surface it may seem that the punishment (death) far exceeds the crime (spamming) let's do a little math.

Say I spend 10 seconds managing my spam every 2-3 days. That's 28 seconds a week. No big deal right?

Say I've been doing it for the last 5 years and will continue to for the next 55.

(5 + 55) * 52 weeks * 28 seconds a week = 87,360 seconds (24.266~ hours). Still not that bad, just one day.

Someone who lives 80 years only gets 700,800 hours to live.

That means spammers only have to annoy 28,879 people ( 700,800 / 24.266~ = 28,879 ) before they've wasted an entire (long) human lifetime worth of time. Now I know it's a bit of a stretch to equate a human lifetime worth of time to the life of an actual human being, but I begin to wonder. My time is very valuable to me and I'd rather not waste a single second of it deleting unwanted advertisements from my inbox.

But let's take it a little further. According to this [census.gov] there are 6,454,864,470 people on earth at the time of this writing. Say spammers only annoy 5% of them (a low estimate I would guess) for their entire lives. That's still 322,743,223 people who lost a day's time to spam.

24.266 hours per person * 322,743,223 people = 7831902223.6 hours wasted.

That's 11,175.66 human lifetimes!

If you want to equate those to actual deaths here are some comparisons:

"British Medial Journal indicating that passive smoking kills over 11,000 people in UK." (http://www.sdlp.ie/pr2march2005.shtm [www.sdlp.ie]).

"To take prostate cancer as an example, although it kills over 11,000 men a year..." (http://www.icr.ac.uk/press/releases/cancerchip.ht ml [icr.ac.uk])

"Gun violence kills over 11,000 Americans every year..." (http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2002/11 /08/opinion/6293.shtml [dailyprincetonian.com])

These were extremely low estimates, the world's population is growing, and the amount of spam is growing.

Still think the punishment didn't fit the crime? I'm not sure anymore myself.

Re:Why would it be the mafia?

[Glonoinha]

Once upon a time I had connections in the Russian mafia.
They don't generally make people mysteriously disappear.
They do, however, make examples of people by messing them up in a most brutal and bloody fasion.

I'm not saying this was a mob hit, but I will assure you that it isn't surely 'not a mob hit' (if that makes sense.)