FBI Raids Home of Spam King Alan Ralsky 422
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."
Well is he shut down or not? (Score:3, Insightful)
Porn? (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, spamming is okay as long as you're a big corporation that either does or may contribute or lobby congress at some point.
Spamming is only bad if you're a private citizen doing it, sort of like how raping teenage babysitters, doing coke, driving drunk and killing women when you drive off a bridge and wander away is only bad for private citizens.
Re:Too bad... (deprived of property w/o due proces (Score:4, Insightful)
One down, thousands more to go. (Score:2, Insightful)
Stop the buyers not the spammers. (Score:2, Insightful)
Much as it's great to see a suspected criminal arrested for sending this crap out, there's no chance that it'll actually made any significant dent in the torrent of spam flowing through mail servers every day.
A Step Forward In the Fight Against Spam (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason spammers operate is because it has been profitable for them due to their operating expenses (apathetic law enforcement, hazy jurisdiction, theft of third-party bandwidth and resources).
As more of these people get raided and have to deal with serious legal and criminal issues, the "cost" of operating will go up substantially, and as a result, it will not be as profitable for them to operate.
Let's hope the FBI follows through on this and puts this guy in jail. There's no doubt he committed a ton of crimes, including computer tampering, pornography, identity theft, etc. Spammers routinely break loads of laws in operating their business. Finally, we're seeing some agencies start to enforce these laws.
Re:Call your FBI and say thanks! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stop the buyers not the spammers. (Score:2, Insightful)
I doubt that. Spamhaus estimates that a couple hundred people are responsible for most of the world's spam. If spammers are regularly arrested and sent off to jail, my guess the bottom-feeders doing it will return to embezzlement, pigeon drops, and selling Herbalife. They've just picked spamming because the risk/reward ratio is currently better.
Re:Too bad... (deprived of property w/o due proces (Score:4, Insightful)
From the Wikipedia article on due process [wikipedia.org]:
Was he notified before the raid? Did he get a chance to be heard and to oppose the raid before it happened? I know he will have an opportunity to do so in the trial (if there is one), but the point is that even now his livelihood has already been destroyed.
I know it's hard to sympathise with Ralsky, but this could also happen to many other people if they are sued by the RIAA or MPAA, using exactly the same legal principle.
Re:Call your FBI and say thanks! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you hardly get any spam at all, then why do you need *TWO* spam filters?
You *GET* lots of spam - just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.
Re:Call your FBI and say thanks! (Score:4, Insightful)
Hold your horses. Why was he "raided"? What law did he break? Did you break the same law last week?
I hate spammers with a passion, but I like my freedom a little more than they are irritating to me.
Re:Charged with what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Will I be notified (Score:4, Insightful)
The article is a bit thin on details, tho. It's mostly background info on Ralsky. Why was he raided? CAN-SPAM violations? Or was he found suspect of something else (fraud, maybe?)
"60 year old, gregarious, heavy smoker". Methinks nature will take him out soon enough.
Re:Charged with what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Too bad... (deprived of property w/o due proces (Score:4, Insightful)
The FBI will be performing a raid on your crack house at 123 N. Main, on October 27th at 11:45pm. We better not finding anything illegal there.
Your friendly Federal Bureal of Investigation
I'm sorry but are you a fucking retard? The point of a raid is to go in and find indisputalable evidence that the crime was committed. A warrent will show that there is some evidence to it happening, but the raid will produce the evidence that will make the trail happen and get the assholes into jail. Or are you just afraid the FBI will raid your house and steal your computer to arrest you for all your downloaded p0rn, and MP3s.
Re:Charged with what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stop the buyers not the spammers. (Score:2, Insightful)
Cracking down on spammers by the FBI is great. If they do business in the USA, it becomes a question of when, not if they will be shut down and in jail. We can handle the filtering and education part of the War on Spam, and the FBI can handle theirs.
Re:Too bad... (deprived of property w/o due proces (Score:4, Insightful)
If the kits didn't exist, they would have to send the sample to the lab to have it analyzed. That's what they are doing with the hard drives since there is no step 1,2,3 test kit to prove this crime.
It comes down to the police having enough good evidence to convience a judge that the crime most likely did happened and that he should write a search warrent. I have no problem at all with that as long as the police and the judge are technically savy enough to analyze the evidence to know what it really means. If they aren't savy enough, that's when you are likely to get the bad warrents and the bad outcomes.
Re:Call your FBI and say thanks! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I don't get lots of spam. Most of it is denied at the SMTP protocol level and is never even written to disk. Most of the rest is filtered out based on content and /dev/null'd before it reaches the mailbox delivery step. The client side filter is then left to handle the very small quantity of mail that is difficult to discern with more general measures and makes it past the SMTP and MDA level and is of course then downloaded by the useragent for fine-tuning of the local filter.
Okay, I've seen responses like this in the past, and I'll admit that I have little knowledge of how the whole thing works (because I'm not really interested as long as it works). However, whether those messages are being dumped into my throw-away hotmail account's junk folder or being transported *somewhere*, they are being written to disk somewhere. They are also using up bandwidth during transport, and that bandwidth is not being paid for by the spammers. I don't understand the logic of people who claim spam is not a problem just because they don't see any in their inbox. That seems a bit like claiming that the termites aren't really a problem because your house hasn't fallen down yet.
Re:Waste of tax dollars (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. It's only spam. Unless you're a family on 56k having to download several hundred kilobytes, or even megabytes, of e-mail you have no use for, no wish to receive, and no convenient way of stopping since your ISP will only offer to sell you their "premium" e-mail with anti-spam services for some extortionate amount.
Not everyone knows how to set up their own mail server, blacklists, or whatever. Not everyone can simply up and switch providers every time their current address gets unusably bogged down with spam.
They didn't take him into custody (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, there are clandestine warrants - entry and installation of a logger followed by entry with a "regular" warrant to collect the data & computers. Perhaps an arrest will follow shortly.
If all the matter comes down to is a nice little fine....
This clown will just up his contribution to the Republicans - just making money as a free rider is status quo ante for the Bushies.
Re:Will I be notified (Score:5, Insightful)
they just took away his stuff, how lame! he committed a crime and should be punished.
Ya know, as big of a sleezeball as we might think he is, the FBI doesn't (nor should it) have the authority to punish him for whatever crimes you think he might have committed.
That role is reserved for juries and judges.
Re:Too bad... (deprived of property w/o due proces (Score:4, Insightful)
And although Mr. Ralsky says he is effectively out of business, I trust him and this statement as much as I trust his honorable treatment of email address removal requests - which is no trust at all*. He certainly has backup tapes off site. He also has the means to start right back up - or he should have, considering the money involved. If he doesn't, then he is an idiot, and gets what he deserves. SBC wouldn't go out of business if their bookkeeping computers were seized - same principle here.
I know I expect SourceForge to have backup tapes held off site. If SourceForge and OSDN don't have disaster recovery plans already written and tested - shame on them.
Every business that depends on IT should have a DR plan. Even if law enforcement mistakenly seizes your computers - that doesn't excuse your business from failing. Once you get 'large enough' it is irresponsible to not have a DR plan.
*According to the Spamhaus Project [spamhaus.org], Mr. Ralsky hosts his email servers in China to evade U.S. law. [spamhaus.org] And as an email administrator, I don't see any evidence that email removal requests result in less spam - quite the opposite, really.
Re:Waste of tax dollars (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Waste of tax dollars (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously, God needs to kill more kittens.
Re:Charged with what? (Score:5, Insightful)
All higher costs incurred by the ISP are passed along to the consumer, ergo all of the damage is done to the user, though indirectly.
Re:Stop the buyers not the spammers. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is simply not possible.
The cost of spamming is so low that you can send multiple emails to every person on the planet, and if you get even a single response, you've made a profit.
In order to eliminate spam you're going to have to eliminate stupid people. Every single one of them on the entire planet.
Ain't gonna happen.
Re:A Step Forward In the Fight Against Spam (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank you, judge, jury and executioner.
Hey! I dislike spammers as much as the next guy but blanket statements like this don't help the cause.
Do you understand what spamming is? Do you understand why people spam and how they can profit from it?
Spamming is based on theft. Spamming involves a disproportionate exploitation of resources vs. costs. Spammers steal bandwidth and resources, and most of them steal identity information as well. Pure and simple. What people like Ralsky do is break the law, each and every day. This isn't speculation. This is a fact. If you identify one zombied PC he has exploited as an SMTP server, he's broken at least a half-dozen laws, including federal ones. There is no doubt about that.
I'm not talking about legitimate e-mail operators. There's a big difference between sending to a mailing list, or operating a promotional mailing from a fixed IP block. That's not what the bad spammers do, and these days we distinguish between different types of UCE because this new breed, like Ralsky, have no ethics and no compunction whatsoever to flagrantly steal other peoples' resources and indiscriminately pollute the net with profoundly inappropriate solicitations. They break laws each and every day, each and every minute. Go google "computer crime laws" and you'll see tons of listings on every level that clearly could apply to activities perpetrated on a daily basis by these spammers.
If spammers operated from fixed IP blocks, most of the anti-spammer arguments might hold water, but they don't. The vast majority of spam these days is now coming from compromised computers that are repurposed as on-the-fly SMTP servers unbeknowst to their owners, and ignored by their ISPs. The only way to deal with this is a) RBL the irresponsible ISPs, and b) go after these guys for computer tampering and other criminal offenses.
All the spammers these days who want to accomplish anything are exploiting zombie relays. This is illegal. It can also be considered a capital crime under the USA Patriot Act.
Re:Waste of tax dollars (Score:5, Insightful)
He might not go round clubbing people and taking their money, but he's still a big time criminal, defrauding people of millions of dollars. He's causing economic harm on massive scales, and the people being hurt are more often than not the elderly.
He's also an easy target since he publically boasts about what he does, the FBI would be considered neglectful if they didn't take him down.
Re:Charged with what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you really that naive? What about the time it takes to sort through hundreds of spam messages to find the legitimate email? What about the time it takes to sort through your spam folder for false positives? What about the money you have to spend for anti-spam software?
You must not get much email from real people if you think dealing with spam is as simple as "hit delete."
Jeez!
Re:Waste of tax dollars (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a choice whether I buy Microsoft products or not. I do not have a choice whether I receive spam (short of stopping using email altogether).
Re:One down, thousands more to go. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but most spam is sent thru zombie machines. You need to do something much more drastic than arresting spam kings, you need to get rid of their "slaves", too.
No, believe it or not (Score:3, Insightful)
Now not all spam is legal, as per CAN-SPAM, some is legal. However most isn't. Most of it is fradulant in nature, or does not have the proper opt-outs and such. Thus, it can be subject to a criminal investigation.
But please, stop the stupid hyperbole. The FBI is plenty capable of doing more than one thing at once, including things you like and things you don't. The answer isn't to get all whiny about it, it is to try and get the law changed. The FBI doesn't make the law, they enforce the law. If you disagree with the law don't demand they don't enforce it, demand that our legslature change it. It's quite clear our definitions for obsecity are out of date and need to be updated.
Write your congressmen and let them know this, and make it clear that it is an issue that will influence how you vote. Oh and pleaes leave out the hyperbole and personal attacks. That won't win you any points. You want to appear professional and rational. Let them know you have good reasons for believing what you do and that it is something they'd better pay attention to.
'Then they came for the spammers' (Score:4, Insightful)
First they came for the child pornography wierdos
and I did not speak out
because I did not look at child Pornography
Then they came for the spammers
and I did not speak out
because I did not spam
Then they came for the GNAA
and I did not speak out
because I was not a troll
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me
Re:Too bad... (deprived of property w/o due proces (Score:4, Insightful)
The point is that FBI seizure of computers for evidence is extremely disruptive, and (since the computers are generally kept for at least a full obsolescence cycle and often damaged) amounts to taking stuff and not giving it back. We've all heard stories about people and organizations who lose lots of stuff for no good reason. The most famous recent one was Indymedia but there are others. That sort of thing is not supposed to happen.
condolences (Score:4, Insightful)
Alan Murray Ralsky
6747 Minnow Pond Dr,
West Bloomfield, MI 48322
Telephone: 248-926-0688 * Confirmed
Remember console frequently, and console late at night. Snail Mail gladly accepted. In fact, considering the trash he's sent us, filling his voicemail is entirely appropriate. Read him your spam. Read it slowly.
Re:Charged with what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile, I suggest one better. jail him for average transmission time between SMTP server and user, and fine him for bandwidth costs.
Do some math now...
call it 0.01 seconds per message, at about 100kB
I presently pay $10/month for 1G of bandwidth/month at my host, making one spam cost 0.095 cents.
That's 15 years and a fine of $47,500,000 for 50 billion spams.
Seems appropriate...
Bandwidth (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Too bad... (deprived of property w/o due proces (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:'Then they came for the spammers' (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, they came for the criminals. That's because if they don't, the criminals will come for you.
And spam is not a victimless crime. Anyone believing the opposite is more then welcome to send me a cheque for the part of my bandwidth costs that are caused by spam, plus a much, much larger one for the time it wastes.