FBI Raids Home of Spam King Alan Ralsky

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."

Re:Charged with what?

[Coneasfast]

Last time I checked, it was legal to e-mail someone you don't know.

if you read the article (not slashdotted yet):

The law also forbids spammers from using multiple e-mail addresses or domain names to camouflage their identities. Penalties include up to 20 years' imprisonment and an $11,000 fine per offense.

Warrants show FBI agents sought evidence Ralsky and Bradley sent commercial e-mail using at least 14 domain names.

Re:Too bad... (deprived of property w/o due proces

[bersl2]

Warrants unsealed last week revealed that agents in September seized computers, laptops, financial records and disks from the 8,000-square-foot home of Alan M. Ralsky.

Apparently, he is getting due process.

Ralsky isn't the worst..

[Dynamoo]

Ralksy isn't the worst of the bunch.. perhaps his BIGGEST mistake is actually having some sort of media profile. There are plenty of spammers out there who are even more despicable than him, but it seems that Ralsky is an easy target. Perhaps they should consider going after Robert Soloway [spamhaus.org] or Alec Defrawy [thedefrawyscams.com] next?

Re:Good for inbox, Bad for legal system

[eclectro]

Because it was the FBI, they were enforcing federal law, not a local law that the Michigan lawmakers may have passed.

Re:Waste of tax dollars

[humankind]

Ignorant, uninformed responses like yours really tick me off.

As an ISP that has to spend twice as much on bandwidth and resources as I need because of the bandwidth spammers consume, I can certify that it costs me a lot of money.

Upwards of 70-80% of all mail traffic on the net is spam. Probably at least one third of all Internet traffic may end up being bandwidth and resources these scumbags steal, usually by exploiting armies of compromised, zombied PCs to do their distribution.

Don't even get me started about the countless hours of tech support, computer downtime and other wasted resources due to innocent (and sometimes naive) computer users who have inadvertently had trojan software/plug-ins or worms invade their machines... This is all the work primarily of spammers.

It's not a simple case of installing a mail filter. That doesn't do a goddam thing to stop spamming. This is like you turning off your television as a way to stop the war in Iraq. Good luck.

Re:The FBI will e-mail you

[geminidomino]

4. Use perl's regular expressions to filter out all the spam

That's what Spamassassin [apache.org] is for.

you don't understand investigations.

[www.sorehands.com]

I had a tour of the FBI's cyber crime office in Boston -- they got some neat toys.

They didn't just take away his stuff. They took away his stuff, to then copy it onto network storage. Then copy the drives onto otpical media. Then copy it onto hard drives. All while leaving the originals unmodified. Then they will analyze the data to gather evidence.

It would be real sweet to know the domains that they used so that every spam victim can file suit against Ralsky and Bradley. We can take out spammers with distributed lawsuits. A spammer can survive 1,2 or maybe 10 lawsuits, but can they survive 100? I, with help, took out Avtech [barbieslapp.com].

I tracked down a big time ink spammer [barbieslapp.com], going under the name of payless inks, top quality inks, inks on sale. I posted the strings to search for on my spam page [barbieslapp.com] so that any spam victim can file suit. If you file suit, contact me and I'd be happy to serve the summons and complaint.

Re:Too bad... (deprived of property w/o due proces

[mikeswi]

There was no mention of it in the article, so it probably wasn't used in Ralsky's case, but....

In the US, law enforcement working for any level of government can seize whatever they want under the RICO Act. They simply have to say "this object was related to selling drugs" and its their's. Doesn't have to be true. Doesn't require a trial. Doesn't even need evidence to support the statement. It is just gone. And good luck getting it back if it isn't related to drugs. http://www.fear.org [fear.org]

I believe it is unconstitutional, but it happens on a very regular basis. One day I hope someone is able to bring it to the US Supreme Court and have all forfeiture laws abolished. But while it exists, it couldn't happen to a more deserving person if they did permanently seize Ralsky's equipment. Even bad laws can be useful occasionally.

Re:Charged with what?

[farbles]

I run an ISP and the cost to us is not bandwidth, but tech time to keep anti-spam filters and software updated, tech time to troubleshoot filtering problems, tech time to keep mail filtering servers updated and running, the cost of the mail filtering servers, the tech support costs for answering client complaints and queries about lost or erroneusly blocked or filtered email and the badwill generated each time we filter or block a legitimate piece of client email.

We have to turf about 94% of all incoming email. I personally get more than 1 Mb of spam filtered to my junk folder a day for manual perusal in case any important messages got tagged by mistake.

Twenty years in prison is peanuts for the suffering these monsters have caused. Put me in a room with this poor excuse for a human and a big woodchipper and I'd be entertained for several whole minutes. No need to look in on us.

Re:condolences

[trelanexiph]

forgot the obligatory google local url:Al's Place [google.com]

Re:Stop the buyers not the spammers.

[bani]

"million zombie pc army". your bandwidth, servers, and electricity are all free via your infected victims. just ask ralsky, he's the master.