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Another Millionaire Spammer Story
An anonymous reader writes "Here's another story about a millionaire spammer who thinks he is doing nothing wrong and can't wait to get his hands on the next generation of spamming software." See also the last installment.
Here's more information on this scum bag:
scum bag info
I'm still looking for the physical adress of his *new* home/data center. If anyone finds it as well as his phone number, or his email *he* uses. Post it!
That the reporter doesn't really like spammers either, don't you? Consider this quote:
Today, Ralsky says he is trying to keep a lower profile, operating through cell phones and unlisted numbers. Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records.
Or, in other words, "I promised not to reveal the address, but if you want to look it up, here's how to do so..."
Subtle no? ;)
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
courtesy of switchboard:
Ralsky, Alan M
5016 Patrick Rd,
West Bloomfield, MI48322-1543
(248)661-3355
He has been sued before. I don't think it has stoped him at all.
Michael Loves Me!
Firstly, can anyone envision what could possibly do this? Does your browser have to be trojoned to accomplish this feat? Could it be an IE-only kind of design bug?
I can envision what would do this - there's been stories about this already. It's those popup messages that come up from Windows Messenger. Easy enough to turn off and block, but most people don't.
Firstly, can anyone envision what could possibly do this?
The MS windows messaging service. With knowledge of an IP, you can send a message a computer that's just sitting on the network, with no software aside from the system + middleware running.
You can turn off the service, use any one of a dozen windows software firewalls, or just uninstall the bugger if you don't use it.
Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam. It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened. "This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
I seriously doubt that this guy has some new revolutionary technology that will allow him to force ads to pop up no matter what we are doing. This sounds like the typical spyware that comes with kazaa and other similar programs. There is a great cure for this: Ad-Aware. This could also be the IE bug that was mentioned on slashdot yesterday.
Whatever this guy is talking about, it can be easily defeated by ad-aware, using mozilla, or disabling activex in IE.
This kind of "stealth spam" he's talking about sounds a lot like the Microsoft Messenger Service spam that we've already seen, and dealt with by closing those ports off to outside traffic.
I'm guessing he means This. another splurge here [torrez.net]
As I'm sure some of the other low-karma respondents have posted, it's Windows Messenger service which is exploited here, no trojan at all. Yes, it works, I've been getting some really amusing "Get a doctorate from a leading non-accredited university" ads while sitting at a terminal in an accredited university's computer lab.
A simpole Yahoo! People Search reveals that there is indeed an Alan Ralsky in West Bloomfield, MI (search results are here). Looks like he's got two phone lines (presumably one for home and one for work), and he apparently has a couple of Yahoo e-mail addresses as well. Send him your spam.
Actually, this is 100% possible, no spyware needed. Windows 98 and above have a messenger service, which gets invoked when you use the NET SEND command. You can easily talk to it from the net, and popup a little "Messenger Service" titled dialogue. You can't embed rich text or links, but it's damn annoying to see University Diploma popups, let me tell you. Luckily, you can just disable the service.
:-)
There are about a trillion hits on Google, so I'll let you do the rest
There is software to stop mass mailings. It's just that there are loads of dumb schmucks out there who haven't bothered to see if anything actually exists to do the job.
r ceforge.net/c c/h an.com/itymbi/archives/000656.html
Course, it's the same dumb schmucks who get all the spam mail, which suits me just fine.
The *real* problem is all these bloody spam stories on Slashdot. You only get spam these days because you want spam or are too dumb to do anything about it...
http://pyzor.sourceforge.net/
http://razor.sou
http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/d
http://www.spamassassin.org/
http://www.zant
etc etc etc etc.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
It's already being used -- it's the messaging pop-ups in Windows. No way to stop it except shutting down the messaging service (which may or may not break other stuff) on the local machine. Univerisities have all ready been hit pretty hard with it. I know it affects Win2k & XP, don't know about anything older.
Here's a picture, from a story about him settling a lawsuit with Verizon last month.
here its his business, err, "real" business.
I want 2D games back.
It's called a winpopup.
You can send one with:
echo -n "Hi, I'm an annoying winpopup" | smbclient -M host
It's already being used -- it's the messaging pop-ups in Windows. No way to stop it except shutting down the messaging service
You mean except firewalling TCP port 139 and UDP 137?
1. This guy is not rich! He's living paycheck to paycheck, he has several huge loans and he has a lot of credit card debt.
2. It doesn't matter that he doesn't own anything he has. He knows how to take advantage of the system. If his spam business starts to go sour, he just declares bankruptcy again and gets to keep all his stuff. Then he sells some of it and moves on to his next scam.
3. He's always made his money by stealing from other people. Look for words in the article like "bankruptcy", "insurance", "defrauded", and "marketing".
Why we allow people like this to live, I'll never know...
...just my 2 gil.
regardless whether or not NET SEND or any other program is native to windows (or any OS for that matter).. his quote is utter *nonsense* in the regard that it will get past a good firewall. in order to use NET SEND you have to have port 18 tcp open as documented here: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/ WinNT/Q_20280521.html ..if a firewall blocks this port, no go for net send.
--even a broken watch is correct twice a day.
Did you like his comment about a web bug that tracks whether the e-mail was opened or not? A little 1x1 pixel image that an HTML reading mail program has to read to open the message is quite an easy way to see what messages are opened and by whom (ip address anyway).
So does anybody else think that using a simple text e-mail reader is now a good thing? If you are reading html, you are giving away information, and I'd rather not do that with spammers.
the "popup" ads are a dirty trick. They make use of the WINPOPUP service. To disable this:
- firewall ports 135-139 (or better, firewall the entire reserved port range and open those you need)
- if the system is win9x, you need to turn off file/print sharing, or at least unbind it from your interface going to the internet
- if the system is NT-based, you need to stop and disable the "Windows Messenger" service. Note that this is not "Messenger the instant messaging client."
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
This newsgroup article describes what happened to one of Ralsky's associates in China when someone complained, included the message "thank you for your support of Falun Gong" in the complaint, and CC'd it to someone in the Chinese government.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Since he lives in west bloomfield and his lawyer (who probably lives near by) lives in bloomfield hills, I was able to find this map to his house, and the following from spamcop.
Aliases and Addresses
Name: Alan M Ralsky 5016 Patrick Rd. West Bloomfield, MI 48322 248-661-3355
Aliases and Addresses
Jeff Kramer 6567 Long Lake Road Birmingham, MI 48009
Domain Name: cambridgewater.net
Jeff Kramer (COCO-227918) aral54
Additional Benefits
2121 Richard Ave W. Bloomfield, MI 48322 248-200-3492
Creative Marketing Zone Inc 5016 Patrick Rd West Bloomfield, MI 48322
Sam Smith (MAILSVC2-DOM) 200 W. Long Lake Drive Troy, MI 48332 US
Domain Name: MAILSVC.NET
Smith, Sam (SS9752) aral
William Window (template COCO-265759)
4512 Westside Royal Oak, Michigan 48098 US
William Window (COCO-265759) aral54
+1 248 544 4314
Alan Ralsky, (AR1574) aral
Sav-Rx (RXPOINT-DOM) Domain Name: RXPOINT.COM
9439 N Leamington Skokie, IL 60077
(847) 677-5516 (FAX) (847) 677-5329
Alan M Ralsky, (AMR43) amr1
Additonal Benefits 5016 Patrick Drive
West Bloomfield, MI 48322 1-248-661-3355 (FAX) 1-248-661-3054
AB Internet 528 S. State St. PMB 523
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
(There is no building face with that address on it. There *is*, however, a building that accepts that mail - the University of Michigan Student Union, and the Mailboxes, Etc. that is housed therein.)
rxpoint.com
5016 Patrick Rd. West Bloomfield, MI 48322
MPI Global 5016 Patrick Road W Bloomfield, MI 48322
(248) 661-3355
mpiglobal 25514 Graceland Dearborn Heights, MI 48125US
Ray Esseily mpiglobal.com
25514 Graceland Drive Dearborn Heights , MI 48125
1-313-278-8845
It isn't a crime in most places.
Condoning spam actually encourages spammers, not just to continue their business at everyone else's expense, but sometimes even to sue people who refuse to pay for receiving the pitches for their scams.
This means that as long as spam is considered a legitimate business, fighting it can be dangerous, even though it is spying out your personal data and usage patterns as well as inundating your entire families' inboxes (including those of children!) with UCE for all sorts of fraud and porn.
Fortunately the voices of reason are finally being heard, therefore much of this is changing:
Spam has just become illegal (article 13) in the entire European Economic Area.
Soon spam will swamp everything else. (...)
OK, spam is not a good thing, but aren't we getting a little carried away here?
The one point you're forgetting could actually be seen as implied in your own statement: Spammers spam everything, everyone, every address, everywhere, all the time. If it's legal, their numbers will continue to rise.
Digital convergence brings eMail addresses to phones, and pagers have also had them for a long time (now tell me how you click "opt out" on any of these!). If the phone or pager of a doctor becomes unusable due to this "perfectly legal activity", it won't be long before people are dying. If the same happens to the device of a firefighter, a hospital's or an airport's system administrator, people are dying all the same, in the name of spam.
If you think this threat is greatly exaggerated, Japan is a few years ahead in mobile technology (page 3), and with spam making up more than 80% of all messaging, their experience with what will globally become everyone's future of electronic communications is just devastating.
Make sure there will be a federal law against spam - and you'd better speak up before it's too late...
Your congress(wo)man is waiting for your mail.
Just now. And tomorrow. And all week/month/year through, until they finally stop the spam.
So yes they're doing stuff like that, but it isn't neccesarily with images.
Note to Mozilla developers -- we may need a flag to turn off not just images in email, but also style sheets, or any other URL reference from email messages.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
3/4 of 1 percent is only 0.75 percent.