Slashdot Mirror
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.
FTC> *knocking*
Spammer> "Who is it?"
FTC> "Flowers"
Spammer> "What?"
FTC> "Pizza delivery"
Spammer> "Oh. Ok."
Spammer> "Hey, you're that spam shark, aren't you?
They cause people to distrust each other. I am very cautious about giving a web site my email address for fear that it will be abused.
They both make email less pleasant.
Their creators all seem to be unremorseful. If only we could send viruses and trojans to them all.
"I don't do any porn or sexual messages," he said, citing a..
can't say I've ever heard of an "ethical" spammer.....
sounds like an oxymoron to me...
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
Yet Another Spammer Story, as if we haven't heard enough.
/. readers to a frenzy
I recently saw the "Bart gets a job as a bartender for the Mob" episode. The episode ended with
Bart: "I realize now that crime doesn't pay"
Fat Tony: "Yeah, I guess you're right"
At which point Fat Tony and his entourage leave in several strech limos.
The only point of posting stories like these seems to be:
1) enraging
2) proving that crime DOES pay.
Why bother?
I like what I do, even though I have to hide from everyone, use unlisted numbers, and pretend like it's not bothering anyone. It's truly the greatest business in the world. And the dog feces that keep coming in the mail don't bother me that much, either.
Find that T1 line.
Step #2 hire some blackhats to turn the entire center into a bunch of machines with blank disks.
Step #3 Repeat as necessary
I've got $20 in my hand that I'd give to that effort in a second.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
As much as everyone complains about spam, it's not going anywhere. The reason? It works. It's the same problem that all of the new invasive advertising (ads superimposed on football fields during games, etc) has.
As much as everyone complains about it, there are sufficient people who respond to the advertising and buy the products. As long as that happens, spam will continue.
I hope the bastard slips up and get his ass sued off. Or better yet his customers get sued. This guy is a millionaire because spam works for companies who sell this crap and pay him to spam us with it. I imagine I'd have a hard time selling pills to enlarge your penis or free xxx pornsite passwords door to door. In fact I'd probably be arrested, especially after I tried to make the sale to a minor who answered the door. I don't see how e-mail should be any different.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
I remember people mentioning this a few /. articles back when we were talking about an effective way to stop spammers and Bernard Shifman...by reporting them to the Chinese government.
:) As was mentioned in the Buckeye case from last night, they'll steal^H^H^H^H^Hconfiscate all his equipment during the "investigation"...
Earlier this month, said Ralsky, somebody told the Chinese government that a Web company from which he leases e-mail servers in Beijing was sending messages critical of Chinese policy.
Police promptly raided the business and confiscated Ralsky's servers. Although they were returned a few days later, Ralsky now tries to cover his tracks better, so opponents won't know what companies and servers he's using.
Linford said he heard of the raid. "It wasn't us that caused it," he said. "But there are a lot of anti-spam activists, and apparently some of them on their own started organizing a campaign to get the Chinese government to think that Ralsky was supporting" the Falun Gong, an outlawed spiritual group the Chinese government considers subversive. "We didn't endorse that, but it shows you how deep the anti-Ralsky feelings are."
If that worked, maybe we can find someone with a much *longer* reach to take him down.
We need to start reporting him as a terrorist to the FBI. We know how pushy they can be.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
First of all no, this is not great. Second, as soon as he talks about intentionally bypassing a firewall, I start thinking that that sounds suspiciously like "circumventing an access control" which, I believe, is no longer legal.
Nope, no sig
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!
But, you know, it sure would be a shame if some /.er in the Oakland area were to go get that address. . . and a real shame if s/he decided to post that address here. I mean, what good could that possibly serve?
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..."
Nah, spammers actually spur Internet growth.
Think of all the legit system admins who spend hours cleaning out overloaded systems, and programmers who develop anti-spam solutions for both networks and users, and additonal bandwith that needs to be purchased so that legit traffic can move past all the spam.
The fact is, the more spam annoys people, the more they're willing to pay us to make it go away.
This guy's obviously a crook. Kicked out of his previous profession for illegal behaviour. Sorry, what he does is not legal -- its stealing. He steals MY bandwidth, which I paid good money for. I have to download his crap mail wasting MY TIME and MY BANDWIDTH. But the solution to this is simple: make a comprehensive e-mail address list of all people you know, and have your e-mail program delete (or download only the header of) anything which isn't from someone you know.
As for pop-up ads and other crap, you can prevent that by a host file. I currently have images.slashdot.org on my hostfile, along with the locations of other sites that slashdot banners come from. I see no ads on Yahoo, CNET, DOWNLOAD.com, WSJ.com, MSN.com, etc. Other things to do are to disable playing sounds or animations, and to remove Flash from you're computer. As a last resort, you can just disable images altogether.
The technology that this crook described which would flash pop-ups to people connected to the internet is also illegal -- it steals MY resources (my RAM, my CPU time, my GPU power, etc). The way to stop that is to refuse non-requested pop-ups or other such information, to close off ports, and to install a firewall.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
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.
Spam is obviously a profitable activity and the writer of the article is trying to emphasize the "millionaire" aspect, but I doubt this guy is a true millionaire.
Has anyone ever considered organizing a directed attack on known spammers? It seems to me that if I have to spend time deleting penis enlargement spam emails and forwarding them onto ucef@ftc.gov, I am losing productivity which in turn costs money.
Considering that that govt in the US is condsidering allowing recording companies to infect P2P networks legally, why shouldn't the same rights be given to a coalition of ordinary people to do directed attacks on spammers and their ISPs who little about the problem?
Romeo & Juliet for 1337 hax0rz! http://www.redcoat.net/pics/romjul.swf
There's always a bit of a lag as law catches up to society. Sure, some people are duped by email, but some people would also like to burn black people on giant crosses for the crime of being born with a certain skin colour.
We have laws against the burning of people based on skin colour, why aren't there laws stopping spammers yet? Just because you can do something, even to the point of making money at it, it does not mean that it is ethical or moral to do!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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.
I'm starting to think real hard about Spam. Inspired, much to my chagrin, by the recent articles concerning AOLs CD spamming campaign. I firmly believe when we wipe ourselves from this rock, and our ruined civilization is discovered, that alien archeologists will assume that an AOL CD is a religious artifact. But I keep thinking about this article, trying to determine why am I really angry. Partly, I'm upset because this person is making alot of money while I'm at work. Partly it's jealousy. I'm conflicted, that hell yes, if you can make 200K+ a year spamming then count me in; and yet, I've been on the net for a while now, before it got really popular, and I also have some of that old code of ethics with me.
... and frankly that scares me.
But at least I have to hand it to this person, at least he's got some morals, or so he says. And at least Spam is environmentally friendly -- it doesn't affect the groundwater or the air I breathe.
And that's a big point. It reminds me that yes, it's upsetting, but at least it's not a lingering mess, environmentally. It's not a SuperFund site.
I'm reminded of Air-Mail delivery in this country. Airplanes were paid by the pound for mail, so more often than not, they would stuff the US mail bags with rocks to make more money. That's the essence of the point: we realize that there is money to be made in bulk. Pay by the pound, all-you-can-eat, spam-o-rama, and hope that just one sucker is out there.
The other point this article brings to light for me is the fact that, for the most part, we humans are actually brighter than I thought. The spam rate is horrendous. Something like 2 in a big-freaking-number. So Spam is casting a very wide net to catch a few sardines. I think that is quite a boost to our combined egos. We aren't as dumb as we behave in traffic.
I know many will make the point that it's clogging routers, servers, and generally a waste of time, but it's a grey area whether that's hard or soft dollars. What's the cost of one more email?
But we can change this. Why can't email be like instant messaging where only those on my buddy list can email me. The Spammer would have to guess my email address and some complicated guid to send me email.
So for me, at least until they change the SMTP/POP RFC to allow for end-user authentication, I'm okay with spam
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
I'm afraid to actually check that out. Because if that is truely his address and phone number I feel really sorry for him. For sure latter tonight he'll hear:
"Hello, Alan, Have you heard the sad news? Steven King is dead at 54! Apparently he..."
As well as, "First Phone Call!"
And of course, "Hey, I've 1) Called you. 2) Uhhh... 3) PROFIT!!!! BTW, FreeBSD/Linux/etc are dying!"
But not before, "Hey Ralsky ol buddy. I think this call just might be one of several beowulf of phone calls!"
When legislation doesn't work, sheer violence might. I say enough's enough, let's beat these people up.
evil adrian
"There are probably about 150 major spammers who are responsible for 90 percent of all the spam everyone gets"
does this remind anyone else of the columbian drug cartels?...sure drugs are everywhere, but a small number of columbian drug cartels are responsible for a large portion of the world's drug traffic...another similarity, we're fighting losing battles against spammers and drugs...we're not making up any ground...
seriously though, why can't some senator or congressman introduce a tough anti-spam bill...does spammers have a strong political lobby like the NRA or big Tobbacco does?...then again, i guess the result would be the same as in this article, spammers would just move more of their actual operations overseas...oh well...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Do you know how he became a millionaire? By sending $5 in cash to each of the five names below. I didn't believe it at first, but it works!
The first time I heard the expression was with a Brazilian friend of mine. He was schooled over there and was visiting his family here in Florida. We were heading down to the gun range to do some skeet shooting and he mentioned that he wanted to step out and "smoke a fag".
You can imagine the confusion that caused.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Instead of Spam Assissin, maybe what we need is Spammer Assissin
When people see that you can buy 8000-sq ft homes, this only encourages others to do the same. He truly is not doing any thing illegal and I think that's where the problem is. Why not write to your congressman/congresswoman and see if you can get legislation passed. That would be more helpful in the long run.
File-trading isn't intrusive. That's the difference. If P2P applications FORCED you to receive any file that anyone wanted to send you, then yes, people here would then lump it with SPAM.
It's not a question of legality, it's a question of access control to your system.
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.
We know where this one lives. Let's go kill him.
Of course, this is a joke. Surely there isn't a single person who reads Slashdot who has been so annoyed by spam that they would go so far as to kill him and burn down his house. Nope. Nobody like that. Even if that person would almost certainly be able to escape punishment if even a tiny amount of forethought were used in the attempt. After all, Virginia police couldn't even catch a homeless muslim sniper after multiple shootings; what are the odds they'll catch some geek who is actually paying attention to not leave any evidence behind?
Of course, this really is a joke. And everyone reading it should take it as a joke. Except for that one very special person. Yes, you my friend. You know what you must do...
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.
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.
"Isn't technology great?"
Okay. I swear, if I was interviewing this guy when he said that, he would have gotten punched in the face. I am one step away from pulling out my 357 and blowing the computer screen to pieces after reading that. For anyone who thinks that this guy should still be allowed to stay in business for complete invasion of someone elses privacy just so that he can have a $750,000 house and live a life of luxury needs to stop huffin' gasoline and prevent our private lives from being invaded further.
Let me lay down the facts: Spamers steal from other businesses in order to deliver messages cheap. I've said this argument before, and I'll say it again. If you pay the Post Office to deliver a package, between the time it is given to the Post Office and the time it is delivered, it is in the possession of the Post Office 100%. Their handling of it, their processing of it, their delivering of it, is all being paid for by the Post Office. When you pay postage to deliver mail / packages, it is because the Post Office is compensated for all the time it takes to deliver the package.
Spammers do not do this. They do not pay for the bandwidth that they use up. They do not pay for the storage space on servers that their spam waits on. They do not pay for delivery of the messages beyond what leaves their servers. They STEAL. This guy, and every other single person who thinks that they can make a mint off invading the privacy of one's own home should be thrown in jail.
This is an outright exploitation of what the internet was set up to be. Stoic advertisements are one thing, because the webpage that a web surfer views is there for free, so the owner of the website is trying to compensate himself for the services he offers. But Spam, as well as this hell-born Son-of-Satan spinoff that our featured spammer friend concocted, is an outright solicitation. Send it all back from which it came, and jail these people who think that this level of exploitation is legal.
How about if everyone in the Detroit area who hates spam would find the guy's address, go to his house, and go up and ring the doorbell. When he answers ask him if he wants to buy something. Strive to make the product annoyingly inane. Make the price exhorbitant so that he can't call your bluff and agree to buy your product. If enough people do this, and they space themselves out, time wise, so that he can just get settled in from answering the door before the next ring of the doorbell, the annoyance level can be maximized. Best of all, it roughly duplicates the annoyance of spam.
Hmm... quite close to my home... I prefer following his car around and loading the windshield with flyers, and also start collecting junk mail for this mailbox. Maybe some Amway people should also try hitting him up.
Ohh... I though of something even more evil.
The local news stations here all have "Problem Solver" segments where people call in problems about corrupt builders not finishing jobs, city works slacking off and not doing their jobs, etc.
With spam being as big an issue I would be surprised if one of the 5 stations teams took it on. It would be interesting to get him on the news and have the people bugging him about why he thinks it ok to do what he's doing. They also do lots of calls to the people, and track them down as they run for their vehicles.
Now to only find his address.
What will make spam and spammers go away? Unfortunately, I don't think there's one 'silver-bullet' solution to the problem (no wisecracks about using the bullet on Ralsky, please ;))
In part, spam is a technological arms race: spammers use more sophisticated ways of getting their messages out, and anti-spammers counter by developing more advanced ways of blocking them. Building a better mousetrap will only force the mice to get smarter. Hacking is not part of the solution, either: if we complain about legislation permitting corporate hacking, we should refrain from doing it ourselves (it's a moral high ground thing...)
Part of the spam problem is money: at least a few people have mastered the "1. Send spam 2. ??? 3. Profit!" formula. An article describing "How I got rich in three easy steps" will, unfortunately, inspire at least a few wannabes, which leads to the next part of the problem...
People. The famous quote that "there's a sucker born every minute" is absolutely true. People can be dumb. People can be greedy. People can be unscrupulous. In an age where someone can blanket the planet with a new get-rich-quick scheme, a pill or cream to enhance sexual prowess, a free vacation to wherever, it's almost guaranteed that their message will find someone who doesn't even hesitate to sign themselves up.
The final part of the problem is something I've never seen mentioned anywhere else: ego. From the article, it sounds like Ralsky knows exactly what he's doing, and he's reveling in the fact that he's notorious/infamous for being one of the best at doing it.
So, how to fix the problem? Use not just one, but every tool at our disposal:
1. Continue developing more sophisticated ways of keeping spam from ever reaching user mailboxes and/or desktops, and try to anticipate how spammers will react in response;
2. Use the existing laws every country has to deal with fraud. Urge local and/or national prosecutors to go after the big fish, making them examples for the smaller ones. Develop international working groups to attack the problem when spammers move their operations overseas. (okay, that last one's a little optimistic, but hey, at least it's an idea...) Nail the fraudsters, shut down their operations, penalize their profits away. The less profit there is, and the harder it is to keep it, the less people will be tempted to try it;
3. Educate, educate, educate: spread the word on how to deal with spam (don't click the opt-out link, don't reply to unsubscribe, learn how to keep your e-mail address from being harvested, etc.) On another level, urge the (possibly clueless) people who think it's a good marketing technique that spam just makes them look like every other get-rich-quick artist they hate getting e-mail from.
4. Marginalize the big fish: the more someone like Ralsky reads about himself in the press or on the Web, the more it feeds his ego. The more dog poop he scrapes off his front steps, the more it eggs him on to keep spamming. Shame and guilt can still be two pretty powerful social-engineering methods, but allowing him to portray himself as a 'victim' of those nasty-evil hackers will only serve to help him and his cause.
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
He's claiming that one out of three spams that are opened in something that renders HTML get a response. I always knew the unwashed web-browser-email masses were dumb, but not that dumb...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I hate to respond to the trolls, but since a patent lawyer once told me the same thing about telemarketers I figured I give you the same response I gave him. The first amendment gives the right to free speech. The first amendment does NOT give the right to an audience. Is it any wonder the patent system is so screwed when one of their lawyers doesn't realize the difference between the two?