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Spam King Lives Large off Others' E-Mail Troubles
An anonymous reader writes "Those who are fighting spam will tell you that one of the most notorious spammers out there is Alan Ralsky. Well, the Detroit Free Press has a very interesting article on him. This guy is about as unrepentant as they come, and he's saying he wants to branch out into delivering pop-up spam via the Windows Messanging service present on most Windows boxes. If you sysadmins out there have been wavering about whether to block spam-friendly networks, read this article, then go to The Spamhaus Project and SPEWS and start getting IP ranges to block." Update: 11/25 12:35 GMT by H : Yep, it's a dupe. Nope, I haven't had my coffee yet.
You might call it the house that spam built.
Alan Ralsky's brand new 8,000-square-foot luxury home near Halsted and Maple in West Bloomfield has been a busy place this month. Outside, landscapers worked against the November cold to get a sprinkler system installed before the ground freezes. Inside, painters prepared to hang wallpaper.
Meanwhile, delivery trucks pulled into the bricked circular driveway with computers, routers, servers and other high-tech gear that will hook up to the high-speed T1 line installed a few weeks ago.
In the lower level of the home, tucked away in a still-unfinished room, will soon be an array of 20 different computers -- the control center of what many believe is the largest single bulk e-mailing operation in the world.
It's an operation still very much in business, despite last month's much-hyped settlement of a lawsuit against Ralsky by Verizon Internet Services. The suit used Virginia's tough anti-spam laws to get Ralsky to promise to stop using Verizon servers and pay an undisclosed fee for sending out millions of unsolicited e-mails to its customers.
Anti-spam groups and Verizon hailed the settlement as a major victory in the war against spam. But that war still feels far away, down on the lower level of Ralsky's home, where racks of computers instruct scores of other computers halfway around the world to fire off millions of e-mails every day.
Ralsky said the legal fuss and settlement costs were a big hit and that things slowed down for a while. But now, after moving a few weeks ago into his new $740,000 house, he claims he's back in business.
"I've gone overseas," he said. "I now send most of my mail from other countries. And that's a shame. I pay a fortune to providers to do this, and I'd much rather have it go to American companies. But I have to stay in business, and if I have to go out of the country, then so be it."
The computers in Ralsky's basement control 190 e-mail servers -- 110 located in Southfield, 50 in Dallas and 30 more in Canada, China, Russia and India. Each computer, he said, is capable of sending out 650,000 messages every hour -- more than a billion a day -- routed through overseas Internet companies Ralsky said are eager to sell him bandwidth.
All this is bad news to the anti-spam movement.
"He's very sophisticated in his activities," said John Mozena of Grosse Pointe Woods, a founder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (www.cauce.org), a national spam-fighting organization. "He uses hundreds of domains (Internet addresses) to send his spams."
In London, Steve Linford of the Spamhaus Project (www.spamhaus.org) has monitored Ralsky for several years.
"There are probably about 150 major spammers who are responsible for 90 percent of all the spam everyone gets," said Linford. "Ralsky has been the biggest of them, and is certainly still in the top five."
Ralsky used to be easy to locate, with a listed address and phone number. But his attorney, Robert Harrison of Bloomfield Hills, said Ralsky is so hated by anti-spammers that he's had to be less visible.
"There were threats against him, cars driving by and people checking out his house," Harrison said. "Someone even left a package of what appeared to be dog feces."
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.
Ralsky admits to using lots of different domain names and Internet providers, but said he does nothing illegal. He prefers to call his e-mails marketing messages instead of spam.
Whatever you call it, unsolicited messages now account for 36 percent of all e-mail, up from just 8 percent a year ago, according to Brightmail, a leading anti-spam software maker.
Ralsky has done his share to account for the increase.
"I'll never quit," said the 57-year-old master of spam. "I like what I do. This is the greatest business in the world."
It's made him a millionaire, he said, seated in the wood-paneled first floor library of his new house. "In fact," he added, "this wing was probably paid for by an e-mail I sent out for a couple of years promoting a weight-loss plan."
Ralsky said he turns down many who want his services.
"I don't do any porn or sexual messages," he said, citing a promise he made to his wife, Irmengard. Instead, he sends e-mail come-ons for things like online casinos, vacation promotions, mortgage refinancing and Internet pharmacies.
Ralsky acknowledges that his success with spam arose out of a less-than-impressive business background. In 1992, while in the insurance business, he served a 50-day jail term for a charge arising out of the sale of unregistered securities. And in 1994, he was convicted of falsifying documents that defrauded financial institutions in Michigan and Ohio and ordered to pay $74,000 in restitution.
He lost his license to sell insurance and he declared personal bankruptcy. But in 1997, he sold a late model green Toyota and used the money to pay back taxes on his house and buy two computers.
A friend had told him about mass marketing on the Internet, and he thought it made sense. He bought a couple of mailing lists from advertising brokers and, with the help of the computers, launched a new career that soon was making him $6,000 a week.
In the lower level of his house, working around a half-dozen computers sitting atop temporary tables, two of Ralsky's associates monitored the operation.
One of them, Ralsky's list man, concentrated on finding new names to add to the 250 million e-mail addresses in his database and weeding out canceled accounts.
The other kept track of current campaigns, connecting with the bank of e-mail servers in Southfield and watching as e-mails scrolled line-by-line in rapid fire down the screen.
"There is no way this can be stopped," Ralsky said. "It's a perfectly legal business that has allowed anybody to compete with the Fortune 500 companies."
Ralsky said he includes a link on each e-mail he sends that lets the recipient opt out of any future mailings. He said 89 million people have done just that over the past five years, and he keeps a list of them that grows by about 1,000 every day. That list is constantly run against his master list of 250 million valid addresses.
Ralsky's list man is named Charlie Brown. That's his real name, he said, describing himself as a native of Louisiana who travels the country working as a consultant to bulk e-mailers, developing custom software called harvesting programs that constantly scour the Internet, gaining access to millions of Web sites and mailing lists every day in search of any and all e-mail addresses.
The response rate is the key to the whole operation, said Ralsky. These days, it's about one-quarter of 1 percent.
"But you figure it out," said Ralsky. "When you're sending out 250 million e-mails, even a blind squirrel will find a nut."
Ralsky makes his money by charging the companies that hire him to send bulk e-mail a commission on sales. He sometimes charges just a flat fee, up to $22,000, for a single mailing to his entire database.
Ralsky has other ways to monitor the success of his campaigns. Buried in every e-mail he sends is a hidden code that sends back a message every time the e-mail is opened. About three-quarters of 1 percent of all the messages are opened by their recipients, he said. The rest are deleted.
From that response, Ralsky can monitor the effectiveness of his pitch and the subject line on the e-mail to make sure he's getting maximum return. He said he spends 18 hours a day on the job.
Ralsky said he's frustrated by attacks on his character by the anti-spammers. Linford said his organization has been getting Internet networks around the world to block mail from any Chinese provider that sends Ralsky e-mail.
"When the Chinese providers contact us to ask why their outgoing mail is blocked, we tell them because of Ralsky, and they pull his plug," said Linford. "He moves on to another provider and it starts all over again."
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."
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?"
Contact MIKE WENDLAND at 313-222-8861 or mwendland@freepress.com.
Read the original version if you want
This Alan Ralsky?
8 25 6&tid=111
2 .h tm
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/22/165
As described here, quite recently?
http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend22_2002112
Furrfu... So, what's new? Now we know it's SMB popups for sure, then? What were those two Romanians doing telling him that would get through people's firewalls?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Hmm, this repost is within a few days. C'mon now. Its a neat story (those scoundrels), but I am pretty sure this is an exact repost.
Deja vu?
Still livin' large: Another Millionaire Spammer Story
This guy Ralsky sends a billion spams a day, which has got to be costing the unwilling recipients a huge amount of money in wasted resources and time, but the FBI is busy busting a few people who uncap their cable modems in Toledo Ohio.
C'mon, I know this guy deserves to be hung, drawn, and quartered, but let's not repeat the exact same link.
Oh well, time to go to work.
Seriously, how many times do we need to have the same damn article on slashdot in less than a week.
Article Mod: -1 Redundant. Really Redundant.
In the law there is no overlap between theft and copyright infringement whatsoever.
... if spammers were treated by the law in the same way as breakers of the DMCA.
It's even better the second time round!
He really thinks this is revolutionary, some kind of cloak and dagger secret development, where in fact he's got together a bunch of Romanian hackers (ie CHEAP) to send dodgy popups via windows messaging. What a TOOL.
He's either being conned or is a total looohoooseheeeeeeer!!!! (or both). Yes, you heard me: LOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOSEHHHHHHEEEEEEER. (And before you smirk Mr Lasky Pasky, we know you're mortgaged to the hilt.
I have nothing better to do. I'm three years away from being eighteen. Obliterating a spammers computer network? Fun.
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.
Hehe. Looks like someone is going to get some hatemail. Nice of Mike Wendland to slip that in there like that.
The response rate is the key to the whole operation, said Ralsky. These days, it's about one-quarter of 1 percent.
"But you figure it out," said Ralsky. "When you're sending out 250 million e-mails, even a blind squirrel will find a nut."
Has he never figured out that if he spewed out less shit to people not wanting it, he would have to spend less dollars on hardware, bandwidth and personal security.
Also, it looks like he is trying to hide (stealth spam, etc.). Why does he do that as he is claiming that his business is legitimate. Why not admit that he is a shit-bag, sending loads of e-mails nobody wants, eating bandwidth from research and serious commercial sites.
I hate government intervention in the markets and involving the FBI should be an absolute nightmare to anyone with even a bit of libertarian in his heart.
"I don't do any porn or sexual messages," he said, citing a promise he made to his wife, Irmengard.
Thank *god* we have a man of such impeccable character handling business like that!
Mmm. SPAMNet, I love you. I get 1-2 SPAM e-mails a day, down from 20 or 30. Windows Messaging Service has been turned off by me minutes after installing XP, thank you. He'll do this, it'll be a pain for a week, then Steve Gibson at GRC.com will slap some binary together that will turn off WMS for those people that don't know how. It'll then show up all over the web and people careful about their computing environment won't be bothered by this SPAM shit. There should be laws against this!
Regardless of what Mr. Ralsky says, I don't feel that this new breed of Spam will ever come close to the problem e-mail Spam has. It seems to me that this type of spamming is just too easy to block. If this starts to become widespread, ISP's will likely ban any offending account. Any halfway secure corporate intranet should already prevent Windows messages to be passed in from the outside.
Ultimately, it's a lot harder to hide the identity of the sender here. There's no spoofed headers to fool people. Furthermore, most of the public doesn't _need_ Windows Messenging but they do need e-mail.
-- Brinko
So if Blocking Popup Ads is Theft, anyone wanna bet he has a good business model?
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
The bit about the 2 romanian programmers writing something that will pop up messages on your screen. How will that work exactly? Is he being taken for a ride (we can only hope) or are these romanians going to exploit a bug in Windows (unix is safe unless someone is dumb enough to allow all hosts access to their X server) in which case it will be a crime and this f*ckwit can be busted for hacking?
Isn't there some type of indecency law against sending vulgar spam i.e., porn to anyone/everyone including children?
Why isn't he prosecuted for wasting people's time (for having to sift through all the spamcrap when reading e-mail) and using people's resources (HD space, internet account space) with unauthorized e-mail?
Isn't he committing fraud with these mailers? He's defrauding legitimate businesses who think they can make money through spam advertising; this is a lie since everyone hates spam. Moreover, some are using his spam services for fraudulent schemes (get rich schemes).
All the +5 funny responses about digging up +5 insightful and +5 informative responses that have already been posted on repeat stories!
that he's getting paid for it. Perhaps if people stopped paying for spam to be sent, there would be no more spam.
>I pay a fortune to providers to do this, and I'd
>much rather have it go to American companies. But
> *I have to stay in business,*
I beg to differ...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Now Just imagine if all of us did this, a different person, every week, for years. Eventually he'd get repentant.
What might be even better: take the spam out of the can and splat it against his car window...
Okay, individually some of us will get caught and fined, but really, isn't it worth it?
The USPS doesn't get revenue from taxes, it gets it through selling postage. It may get shots in the arm from tax dollars, but so does any other corporate welfare recipient. With snail mail the costs associated with sending out a BILLION pieces of mail is astronomically high and no one would ever do it without expecting an equally high rate of return. With spam there is virtually no cost with throwaway dialup accounts. The cost is transferred from the sender to the receiver with e-mail.
I think people who copy the interview and then re-post it on slashdot as the first reply are great!
That said, From that response, Ralsky can monitor the effectiveness of his pitch and the subject line on the e-mail to make sure he's getting maximum return. Does this mean we should start opening e-mails that we are certain not to buy the product of?
Instead of firewalling the port, hack a small script that listens on the port and launches a "countermeasures" against the source IP adress.
Would some kind Windows hacker please program this?!
Yes I am aware that there may be legal implications, I'm just thinking about the tech here. That's why I'm saying countermeasures and not counterattacks, e.g. some kind of teergrube
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Spammer / entrepeneur Alan Ralsky was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Lots of the spam recipients are just fed up, and after each spam run thousands of annoyed people slashdot spamvertized accounts on Netmails.com until it blows the whistle. With the effect that "paying customers" look for a new hoster with better performance and will no longer supply Netmails.com with money. Hosting costs (traffic) on Netmails.com's side are growing, income is shrinking - so finally Netmails.com will have to change their spamfriendly business model or go down.
If spammers and spamfriendly hosters will make the experience of each spam wave resulting in an enormous amount of network traffic and server load, they will have to think twice whether their infrastructure withstands the next spam run...
(This is crossposted from the Nov 22 story)
"Buried in every e-mail he sends is a hidden code that sends back a message every time the e-mail is opened."
Err, what exactly does this mean, can anyone tell me? I really, really doubt that opening a mail in, say, pine will send back any message without action on my part.
So, is this something which triggers MS Outlook? Or is this just some BS that spammer told the poor journalist?
Alex
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
The USPS has not received tax money for operating expenses since 1982 (see here). Furthermore, people who send real-world junk-mail pay for the postage and the mailing. It's probably one of the bigger money makers for the USPS. If they didn't, it would have been stopped long ago.
E-mail spam is theft of service, pure and simple: the people sending the spam aren't paying the full cost.
I hate government intervention in the markets and involving the FBI should be an absolute nightmare to anyone with even a bit of libertarian in his heart.
So, libertarians now endorse theft because stopping it would restrict the liberty of the thief? I guess that sums up the internal contradictions of libertarianism as well as anything.
If he does that, then I think it is ok to hack into his machines. Since he is doing the same to ours. And since we will hack his machines we should bring them down and make them self destruct....
He started the battle not us!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
As much as I dislike spam (2/3 of my daily mail
is spam), I dislike spamhouse/spews as well. Their
idea of blocking complete netblocks is IMHO
an utter failure - the damage is done to many small
websites that are on the netblock perchance.
The 'bad guys' are too high up to care if one of their
C-class netblocks has some problem. After all,
it is the webhosting companies on that netblock
who will loose customers, not the network operators.
... let's fight spam instead!
...a possible address
Ralsky, Alan M
5016 Patrick Rd,
West Bloomfield,
MI 48322-1543
(248)661-3355
And say hi from me with a whack by a clue-by-four
The Messenger Service hole was patched by MS weeks ago. Anyone running automatic updates, or anyone who does it reasonably often won't have this problem.
Listen folks - next time around (that is, the next time you see a dupe), go back to the original posting, and copy and paste your postings into the same place in the new article. That'll stick it to em.
(The rest is special offers from Nigeria.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> This guy Ralsky sends a billion spams a day, which has got to be costing the unwilling recipients a huge amount of money in wasted resources and time, but the FBI is busy busting a few people who uncap their cable modems in Toledo Ohio.
Yeah, they need the bandwidth to download all that spam as fast as it arrives.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Yep, you got to love it. In America only two things are considered when in business. 1. Can it make money?....Duh. 2. Is it legal? The question never gets asked. Is it the right thing to do....? We have become a totally amoral society.
Redundant
Now, the real question comes when you consider, is it fair to mod ME down?
- Shadow, the Laughing Orc
http://bomns.sf.net/
they steal our bandwidth, resources.
they steal our time.
surely something in here can be prosecuted for? I doubt that even if we put him in jail that the spam would stop. there are too many of them and the only solution I see is pressure on isps and the SBL soon isps arent going to want the negative publicity. perhaps a spam operation to promote awareness? anything to educate the public to not buy what they read about in email. you have to hit them where it hurts, in the pocket. they will move on.
Then your network bites the dust.
Survival of the fitest and Darwinism in action.
Makes a perfect target for Tomahawk.
Now we should figure some way to link Ralsky with Al-Quaeda and the War on Terror will take care of the rest.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
How about an active DOS campaign against spambones. Serverwars if you will. It's time to take back cyberspace!!
As I have very little server skills, and different priorities, I'll be in the Texas National Guard instead of on the front line.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Nonsense. It is the FBI's job to arrest thieves when they fall under federal rather than the usual state jurisdiction. The only civil liberties issue is that the investigation and arrest must be made in a manner consistent with the rights of the accused (and anyone else who might be involved).
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
found this at http://www.spamblocked.com/
J u1 Eg45fdtL0I1l7A%252bRXryNLPs0tgSXSzgCSYyXdlhnNA5GuI mU26ugsD9TleE3bAJDCkCeR1KHPRAN3eOguDm6GJlXfBQ%252f %252bytAvtEFOk1KIRMQrYhzhCb2%252fQQoDd%252bv6en1TF YgC5qnNLhyvhLoB5SGUpVu6iKfCDtashTT43qqVZrXSD8%252f RiCttILGiR53V3Ej9PwP%252b2eBXeaOfUXhC%252f2kGv9gBL BEbjZkBT5BZE1jokd0tLX47qLUho9KLPMBh4MrQoqSQSTCxhKt LbVavysiAwiD%252f0%252bB0Fw1YlrXnHnr%252bajvdQO%25 2bMJbh0QsBcTlXRdSAMEAAe4%252fdBTKr6X75XKoOdqokT1th 4hOTrPl0cjmcP4pjqlTs48gqJepStYr6ONr59CQFSw%253d&cl ick=center&mqmap.x=159&mqmap.y=88
6747 Minnow Pond Dr, West Bloomfield, MI 48322
The Mapquest search seems to bear out what Mike Wendland's column
reported since Minnow Pond Drive is very near to Halsted/Maple.
http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?mapdata=yN
I hate spam as much as the next person. And I dont like what the dude does. But seriously, as long as there are people willing to pay his salary, he'll be very successful.
So rather than blame this guy for finding a nasty niche market. Why not go after the companies that are paying him. If you ever get spam from him/them/whoever, just make a note to not buy things from a company that uses such an annoying form of advertising. Tell others not to buy from the company either. Don't whine, organize!
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
This is the kind of vermin that may have me rethink my resistance to Capital Punishment.
Just take the basic information from the article, and you can locate him.
Oakland County Realestate listings and closings
Closing in Oakland County for '02
Alan Murray Ralsky
AKA Allen M Ralsky
DOB 29-MAY-45
SSN 358-36-7717
New home purchased 9/2002
Sale record:
Buyer: ALAN MURRAY RALSKY
Buyer Mailing Address: 6747 MINNOW POND DR, WEST BLOOMFIELD, MI 48322
Seller: BING CONSTRUCTION CO
I want to go shove a whole lot of prawn shells in his letterbox and see how he likes it
-- james
That pinpoint makes it look like a tempting target for a smart bomb? Anyone got a laser to paint the target with and a spare bomb to drop on it?
Granted this guy is in a shady business, but still it's perfectly legal. You get spam mail be ordinary mail too and you pay for the delivery too (your tax money makes the USPS go!). So why don't you complain about it, too?
If someone sends stuff through the post they have to pay for the paper, envelopes, printing and postage (possibly two lots of postage if they include a reply paid envelope). They have some financial incentive to only send the stuff to people who want and who can make use of the offer.
Email spammers cost the recipients money and frequently misuse other people's computers in order to send the stuff in the first place. Since there is little cost to the sender they don't much care about who the send it to. Including sending stuff to people who couldn't buy their product even if they wanted to, assuming them can even read the language used.
I was living in an apartment complex while I was attending University, and I got on my neighbours last nerve a few times by playing music too loud in my apartment. A couple of times I got a visit from the local Police, kindly informing me that I was disturbing the peace. They had every right to get angry with me. I was disrupting their lives, in one way or another.
Sharing the Internet with SPAMMERS is a lot like living next door to an inconsiderate neighbour. Sure SPAM is "commercial", but just because something is commercial doesn't make it ok. Would it have been ok for me to blast commercial messages from my stereo into my neighbours apartments? I think not. And just because SPAM can be blocked if you don't want it doesn't make it ok either. My neighbours could have worn ear plugs to block out the sound, but they shouldn't have to.
I wonder how Alan Ralsky would feel if a few inconsiderate neighbours moved in next door to him.
that spam actually works... If scumbags like this can make millons it's because there are enough clueless users that actually buy the shit they advertise.
If hotmail, yahoo and the likes started using a more agressive filtering default policy (bayesian filters, and the like), and most mail clients had this kind of filters on, it's almost certain that the success rate of spam would go down.
As a side note... This guy being a known spammer, and spam being illegal in the states...Why the heck doesn't somebody put him away???
just my 2x10^(-2)$
someone should tell this guy that the messenging spam is already being done, and that he needs to catch up on the times :) my university IP range gets spammed daily with pop up messengin ads for private companies offering financial aid and the like...
As an Englishman with a Hotmail address, it has always annoyed me that all of the spam is advertising American companies.
Of course, all spam is annoying regardless of its source.
However, is this an American problem, or does anyone ever get any remortgaging/sex offers from Europe?
i hate those damn damn damn 'net send' popup spams. some @$$%&!s found our ip block and enjoy thoroghly offering us great deals through popup dialogs.
Actually, there may be a bit of a tax in the sense that first-class subsidizes bulk rate. The USPS is only quasi-independent politically (they're not an agency, nor are they private) and has been much more solicitous of the bulk mailerts "needs" when price-hike time rolls around. Or such is my impression. I don't think bulk mail is a money-loser, but possibly not as profitable as it could be. USPS would certainly hate to lose bulk mail, and they promote the heck out of it if you look at their materials, the ones they don't put out at the local P.O.
But otherwise, carry on!
Just got a spam message by messenger service already. Solution: Change messenger service to disabled startup type. No more messenger spam.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Ok,
I was talking with a colleague about the best scatter deliver system for spam, the meat.
In terms of High Volume/High Pressure, we have decided that the best delivery mechanism would be via truck using the same sort of spray device that grass maintenance companies use.
Anyone happen to have a source for bulk quantities of SPAM(the meat)?
I think its time we create some more overhead for his business. I say we use this address for filling out all sorts of forms that generate junkmail. I can just imagine mounds and mounds of mail blocking his front door every day. He'll have to hire someone just to help him find his legitimate mail.
Any more ideas?
What I don't understand is, there's a small # of /. editors, posting a small # of stories in any given 3- or 4-day span. How is it possible that so many stories get reposted ? In other words, how is it possible that editors are so frequently unaware of what gets posted ?
You should have to read your own swill, so as to prevent double posts from happening. I know it's hard, but you are getting paid.
When I am dialed up to XO Communications, I receive 1-2 pop-ups a day via Windows Messaging Service. The solution is to turn it off, since its fairly useless anyways.
Very simple. One act is against federal law, the other act is not.
:-) your congress person. Call them. Do anything.
It's a Good Thing(tm) when the FBI/Police are allowed to only enforce laws that exist.
What we have to do is change the laws. Write (spam
During the recent campaign/election I had the opportunity to talk with a couple of candidates. I made sure that I understood their stance on my current pet peeves (H1B, DMCA, Copyrights), and voted accordingly. I also informed them as to *why* I was voting the way I was.
Might not do anything.
Might change the world...
www.christopherlewis.com
I do this with all of my junkmail. My goal is to make them pay twice for sending me anything unsolicited.
Seriously, Don't take anything I say seriously.
I wonder how many people would buy a game where the entire premise was hunting down spammers. I'm envisioning a cross between Rainbow 6 and Grand Theft Auto. We can call it "SpamHunter: Hero of the Internet".
Dupe posts are
Comment removed based on user account deletion
With all of the instant messaging tools available out there, is there any reason to run the messenger service to begin with?
This is why I really don't understand what the big deal is about the messenger spam. Just turn the damned thing off.
The same thing goes for spam from the 3rd world. I don't know anybody in China, Rangoon, Nigeria, so I see no reason to accept e-mail from these places. In fact, I would be willing to make the argument that the best way to prevent spam is to ONLY accept email from networks owned by companies that strictly forbid spam. If everyone were to do this, the market for spam hosted on legitimate servers would essentially dry up. That doesn't solve the problem of crackers breaking into systems and setting up spam-relays, but then that problem will only be solved by the owners of the boxes being competent and taking responsibility for securing and updating their systems. If people were keeping an eye on security holes and being vigilant about closing them off, most of the cracker activity online would cease to exist. Lets just see some "1337 d00d" try and break into a system that has been locked down properly and kept up-to-date.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
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.
Someone go look it up and post it!
OK, clearly people need to start dying over this if we want spam to stop. One of you in the audience has to be an ex-marine with a stockpile of guns. Everyone knows that murderers are only caught if they want to be caught. Pick the top 3 spammers and go out and kill them.
In a trust-metric based world, spammers would be considered so disgusting that you would actually gain karma by killing them.
Lets see how quickly new spammers take their place when spamming runs the risk of having someone explode your head over it.
That or write "MAKE MONEY FAST" on a cinder block and drop it in his mailbox.
Is it legal when he bypasses security systems for these popups?? Is that not Illegal acccess of computers? Is that not hacking and prosecutable? Ride the wild Bull through the internet.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BF
The article says he's got a T1 going to his home. Can we figure out who he got it from and petition them to shut down his connection? Without that, he can't run his business from home. Can someone local also check and see if he's in violation of any zoning laws for running this operation out of his home?
Et Tu, Slashdot?
One of the ways SPAM manages to propogate so readily is the fact that it is often bounced off systems with open relays. This is done unknown to many of the remote sysadmins, who either don't know or don't really care about their open relays. "I've gone overseas," he said. "I now send most of my mail from other countries. And that's a shame. I pay a fortune to providers to do this... This article does indicate that there are a certain amount of foreign ISP's willing to allow the spamcrap through though, some in Canada no less (which means me, as a Canadian, very unhappy).
Is there an equivilent "open relay" for Windows Messaging Service? If not, addresses could probably be much easier to block via IP, as they would have to be broadcast by "willing" recipients (or those trojan infected, etc). As above, I suppose some scummy ISPS would be willing to host the infectious service, but hopefully they wouldn't be as hard to blacklist as the fluxuous number of open relays?
Does this go on the client machine? This the only way I could think of that this would work. In such case, sounds like a trojan to me, and I'm fairly sure the Kazaa people already figured this one out...
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.
....and which version of "morality" do you suggest we use? Southern Babtists? Raging Liberals? Staunch Conservatives?
You see, therein lies the rub. Defining what is moral and what is not is a subjective guess -- at best.
Write (spam :-) your congress person.
Since congresscritters tend to do things for their own benefit most of the time, maybe we could make things more personal. Grab their e-mail addresses (the public ones are probably OK, private ones better but more shady) and include them in your signature when you post to newsgroups, e-mail lists, what-have-you. Something innocent, like:
I participate in the legal system, you should too!
E-mail your representatives! Mine are:
Sen. Bribetaker: bribetaker@senate.gov.fake
Sen. Moneybags: moneybags@senate.gov.fake
Rep. B.S.Artiste: artiste@congress.gov.fake
or whatever. Then post furiously in public forums, let the address grabbers pick up on the addresses, and wait until pure annoyance causes anti-spam legislation.
-SablKnight
Will the Congress show the same headlong rush when it comes time to take the blame for what happens?
Yep, but a headlong rush away from whatever it is.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
We already receive windows messaging ads about getting diplomas, in case the typical network administrator dropped out before he/she acquired one. They really need to consider their audience with this particular annoyance.
I'm not here. This isn't happening.
Unfortunately, Spammers like this will continue to make gobs of money. All one can do is block as much spam as he/she can to try to make one's email experience better. People will continue to buy from spammers, and also continue to get taken by their schemes. And as long as that happens, spam will be around. Has anyone thought that maybe there is a big spam lobby? I mean, think about it, spam is a serious problem, many of us have contacted our legislators about it. And there is no federal law against it or regulating it, and the state laws that are in place, for the most part, suck. Spammers are making *millions*. It stands to reason they could be swaying the powers that be to table spam legislation.
Instant Karma's gonna get you...
I'll pitch in.
Pete and Repeat went into a bar, Pete came out, who was left?
6747 Minnow Pond Road
;-)
West Bloomfield, MI 48322
Mortgage for $875,000.
Gotta love online public records. Mod this puppy up.
Yes, for this post I am an Anonymous Coward.
This is the sort of situation for which discrete assassins were invented.
--- Ban humanity.
SPEWS is run by overzealous idiots and anyone who subscribes is also an idiot. They routinely block entire class A ranges because the network contact information for an upstream provider is out of date. The result is that hundreds or thousands of small companies that happen to have that upstream provider get their mail bounces. Because most small businesses may send mail from domain.com when their business ISP is really company.com, the mail bounces frequently.
Whenever I can't mail a customer, I tell them to complain to their ISP for using SPEWS.
I used to be spam free (!) as I was very careful about whom Id give my real email address.
However, for a few weeks now I contributed to open source developement, and therefore had to write to some mailing list. Now guess what...
Thanks to those $!*$%!* spammers, I no longer contribute anything.
And on a sidenote, all the spam I receive is indeed adressed to Americans.
http://www.ussearch.com/wlcs/application/commercew f?origin=SixProductTeaser.jsp&event=link(browseCat alog)&searchFName=ALAN&searchMName=MURRAY&searchLN ame=RALSKY&searchCity=WEST+BLOOMFIELD&searchState= MI&searchApproxAge=57&searchGender=M&searchZip=483 22&searchAgentNotes=TEASER&adID=10002230
:
For 60$, you should be able to get
-Current Address and up to 10 year history
& available listed phone numbers
-Relatives, roommates and neighbors
-Bankruptcies, Tax liens, Small Claims Civil Judgments *
-Marriage and Divorces *
-Real property ownership and value *
-Full name and possible aliases
CA, TX, NV marriages and TX, NV divorce records *
Deceased search
Bankruptcies
Tax liens *
Small Claims Civil Judgments *
FAA pilot licenses
FAA aircraft registration
USCG documented vessels
DEA controlled substances
So anyone has the $$$ for it ?
I think we have found out what the updated business model is. Whoops.
Sounds like a legend in his own mind or perhaps his victims. Never forget the Net.Admin.Net-abuse.Email rules :
NANE Rules
Rule #0: Spam is theft.
Rule #1: Spammers lie.
Sharp's Corollary: Spammers attempt to re-define "spamming" as that which they do not do.
Rule #2: If a spammer seems to be telling the truth, see Rule #1.
Crissman's Corollary: A spammer, when caught, blames his victims.
Rule #3: Spammers are stupid.
Krueger's Corollary: Spammer lies are really stupid.
Pickett's Commentary: Spammer lies are boring.
Russell's Corollary: Never underestimate the stupidity of spammers.
Spinosa's Corollary: Spammers assume everybody is more stupid than themselves.
news.admin.net-abuse.email Rules
Now reread the original article, amazing how similar it sounds to the last get rich scheme you encountered. [See #2]
That is because it is in order for their dodge pyramid schemes to work these junk emails must convince both the advertising companies & their own pyramid's lower tiers that it 'works' and the market for spam is increasing. It is not it is just steadily stealing more and more bandwidth the cost of which is shared out by legitimate email users. 96% of the email received at one of my drop accounts is junk email; 3% not, that means we pay 32 times (yes times/not percent) more than we should for email.
Angry ? You should get even not angry, don't rant and rave here: tell *everybody* you know UCE dirty little secret.
Send him a nice hand written note, maybe it should
say Hey Al! on the bottom in the attn section. Maybe on the back it should say, '..finally got around to sending you the money I owe you.'
While the above information is marginally interesting to bring business to his local pizza, flower, dildo delivery guys, what i'd really like to know is:
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
More time is spent reading and writing about Spam, than actually dealing with it. My work email never gets spam, and my personal email is set to exclusive. Anyone who really has to deal with spam has to be asking for it, or at least not careful enough to prevent it. Get over it. It's part of life.
PT Barnum is attributed to saying:
"There's a sucker born every minute"
but from the success of spam I'd say more than one every minute. There's alot of just plain STUPID people out there.
I'm somewhat embarassed to admit how many I'm related to as well. Several family members have forwarded me the "FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE" to get a free Disney vacation, case of pop, etc.
On eBay I saw some selling a link to a web site that would let you buy a "High-End" laptop for only $25, and they were getting bids for that "Top-Secret" link. It was over $50 when I saw it.
As long as those suckers are out there willing to give there money away then the spammers are going to be there, in one form or another.
i do think it *is* him. His middle name is Murray. Alan Murray Ralsky as i've also found him on another listing.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Given this link http://www.spamlaws.com/state/summary.html , I belive California has a SPAM law in place. If Ralsky operates from his home in Oakland, regarless if the SPAM is directed through China I would think the simple fact that the SPAM goes though and returns to US backbones and its eventual delivery to US e-mail boxes, isn't his SPAM illegal. Why not take this guy to small claims court, or better yet launch a lawsuit against him representing every internet user in California. Rack this guy up in debt and take him out of business permanently. You'll do us all a favor.
The catalog people say USPS discriminates against bulk mail -- but see a bright future, as bulk mail becomes a larger fraction of all mailings, their muscle will increase. Yippee.
There are lots of sources arguing that first-class subsidizes bail; assuming everyone is honest, the difference may a question of one's accounting practices. Remember Enron?
Cato has an interesting and, unsurprisingly, highly critical profile of USPS going back to the 18th century.
One note: Americans like to savage their postal system, but many don't know how cheap their first-class stamps are relative to many or most other nations, especially consider you pay one rate from one end to the other of a physically large country. Also, the furor over each penny-or-so price increase (and I'm not kidding, at least they always find someone to fulminate on the news) generally ignores the effects of inflation that erode the real price.
They're not perfect, but they're not that bad, either. There is a long list of other governmental functions I would criticize more harshly, anyway.
But no, I don't like junk mail. Be sure to sign up for the Direct Marketing Association's "Mail Preference Service" -- I think it helps, I hope.
A couple of levels of irony here. Not only has this person's home address been posted here, not only have those posts been modded up, not only have people posted suggestions for harassment, assault, and murder of said person for the crime of "making money while being very annoying and probably wasting resources," which have also been modded up, but to ice the cake, we also see posts about how amoral businessmen are!
It's a beautiful day for hypocracy,
A beautiful day for hypocracy,
Won't you be an accomplice?
Maybe this guy Deserves to Lose, at least financially. But if some wacko kills his family, I hope you realize you helped.
Now, to be honest, the chances of someone killing a "spam king" are remote. Wackos generally have more important things to worry about.
Butr it's still pretty pathetic behavior, and the most pathetic part is the relative lack of "and lack of modding of) objections.
Come on, guys. The "spam your congressman" stuff is cool, the "hack away the spam" stuff is cool, the "somebody murder this guy" stuff is ++ uncool.
This can also be used to protect you from Goatse.CX, Comp-U-Geek, Rotton.Com, and other material you don't want to see.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Has anyone mentioned that Spamcop (http://www.spamcop.net) is a far better alternative to Spews (Spamhaus's mission is to limit collateral damage as much as possible, so they are fine)... Spamcop has less collateral damage (legit emails being blocked/bounced). Spews lists large portions of the internet wholesale rather than targetting the spammers alone. In fact, Spews says it "pressures the ISP" with the collateral damage to legit customers and the more legit emails that are bounced/lost, the better. Oh well... to each his own. http://www.antispews.org has more info, http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50455-2, 00.html,
http://www.ifn.net/rblstory.htm for more third-party info.
I've come to the conclusion that the advertising mediums that you see advertised are the ones that don't work. For example, a billboard or a mall map that says "You too can rent this space!" are obviously examples of advertising mediums that don't work (the "Rent this space!" ad is obviously not working because it's still there). Even ClearChannel is trying to fill up radio advertising time slots (that they obviously weren't able to sell) with "Advertise with us!" ads.
With that being said, how many of us have gotten e-mails telling us about the wonders of spamming?
What was his ip subnet again? My filters need a new entry.
Yeah, I just wish spammers could at least check the conuntry TLD of people they're sending to :/.
.co.uk e-mail address. Still, maybe they think the UK is somewhere in the middle east?
Several times I've recieved "Dear Fellow Americans" e-mails on my
I actually was getting a few (three total) SMB windows popup spams on a vanilla XP box i ahd running. I killed the service pronto.
This tactic made me so angry that i'd probably be in shackles now had that spammer been within any damagable distance at the time.
The spam wasn't happening because of a hole in messenger. That's exactly how the thing is supposed to work, it's just mostly useless outside of a network.
As revenues start to decrease in the spam business (legal fees, increasingly complex technology), and as advertisers realize that a clickthrough != a sale, the best way to make money is to sell the dream to pensioners. I'd be surprised if that's not what he's planning.
My bits. Both of em.
You can send him some snail mail. /. his mail box!
lets
Alan B Ralsky
5016 Patrick Rd
West Bloomfield, MI 48322-1543
I saw an article on the front page of the wall street journal a couple weeks ago that was talking about this lady who made her living as a spammer. She said she will profit nearly $200,000 this year and she only works an hour or two a day sending mass emails. She looked like total WT in her picture too. I wish someone would punch her in the mouth.
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
I wonder if his homeowners' insurance provider knows how hated he is, and whether that would affect his rates?
Know all those 'free info' mailers? Fill some out in his name, mail 'em in...Let him get spammed the REAL way, and then they'll share the info with other '3rd parties'
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Idea (perhaps not new):
Would it be possible to dilute their mailing lists with billions of seemingly valid e-mail addresses, spam to which would generate mail-openings and responses, but, in the end, no sales for their end-customers? Their costs would rise. Simultaneously, the customers would be increasingly unwilling to pay for false leads. Oh so sadly, some spammers might be squeezed into unprofitability.
Would this be a practicable approach?
He got a spam from Ralsky offering freebie pics of his cousin taking it from a dragon.
--Moonglum of Elwher
I just saw Ralsky's corpse with his face in his keyboard and a really long Japanese sword sticking out of his back.
Update: 11/25 12:35 GMT by H: Yep, it's a dupe. Nope, I haven't had my coffee yet.
More like:
Update: 11/25 12:35 GMT by H: Yep, it's a dupe. Nope, I have no journalistic integrity.
http://about.me/paultenny
Wow that's very useful! On a completely unrelated note, did you realize that there are well over two hundred gardening catalogs that can be mailed to home, completely free of charge? Mr. Ralsky knows this, or at least, he's going to in about 4-6 weeks...
And then I read this story. :)
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
wanna see some people that deserve the slash-dot effect to crash their site? http://thegreatsoftware.com These colossal asshats are selling email addresses quite openly. The only reason I know about them is because they sent an email to a friend of mine saying that he had bought 2 million email addresses from them!
Personally, I regard a major-league spammer as simply a declared enemy of humanity, making his income across deliberate harassment of people en masse. I see no moral problem against people striking back against them by any means necessary. They're at war with the rest of us.
Apparently I'm not the only person who thinks so, that news article with how-to info on locating its subject was checked at least by an editor before it got printed and in this case, probably all the way up the newspaper hierarchy and by legal counsel as well. They obviously didn't have a problem with the content, what's yours?
If anything unpleasant happens to one, I'd consider throwing a party to celebrate, and I think there's be celebrations around the world. I wouldn't participate in violence against one, but it's quite possible I'd put in a few bucks towards the legal defense fund of anyone who got caught doing so.
If he actually has a family... it's called collateral damage. Of course, if they're old enough to know what he does for a living, I'm a lot less sympathetic. Usama bin Laden has a family, too. Does he get sympathy points over it? Only from the weak-minded.
Tech Public Policy stuff
We have a medium where the sender is explicitly trying his best to prevent the origin of his communications from being traced, where the sender is trying to bypass firewalls and content filters wherever possible, and with mailing lists in the millions.
We have senders who by definition have no personal ethics and presumably have no problem with payment via grocery bags full of $100 bills for content ranging from scans to kiddie porn.
Let's say you're Abdul "Joe' Sixpack wanting to communicate to your worldwide network. Go find Alan, tell him to send your message and add this disk full of names to the list.
As for content, it has to look like ... spam. Names, product names, telephones, or those random alphanumeric strings could be used to convey codebook type content, and I've even seen multiline strings in these e-mails... perhaps these ARE crypto content.
I was joking when I started this. I'm not kidding anymore, this is a very real possibility.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Oh, would I like to open a can of Whoop Ass (Molson's special brew) on these creep's asses!
His disrespect could make a person genuinely believe that the only way to deal with such chronic spammers is to 'delete' them. If they don't care about individuals rights then having their own violated may change opinions. A solution to spammers is needed... something final.
Non sequitir. What does one have to do with the other?
OT to this particular spammer, but I just got a spam selling McAfee crap online. The order form says it's secure, but nowhere does it go to anything https! And of course it asks for a credit card number.
:)
How can we bust the crap out of these retards?
For one thing, I filled out their form with "CUT THE SPAM YOU BLITHERING RETARDS" as my name, and "dslkfjsdlkafj" type data in the other fields, and 4111 1111 1111 1111 for the credit card #. And the hit submit repeatedly.
www.wholesale-software.com is the offender.
One thing this can be consider as is a DoS attack. But isn't that what he is doing? Denying us from using our email?
Privacy is important on the Internet. We put sensative data on our computers, our trends and habits can be easily tracked, we need money to afford our bandwidth, space, and resources. An email is a private thing. Without our consent, what gives him the right to use us as garbage disposals? If so, we should get a % of his dirty profits
[Newbie eyes: "Click here to remove yourself from further email notifations"
Seasoned eyes: "Click here to add yourself to 10 additional spam lists. By clicking, you agreed to let us spam you even more and we do not need your consent to continuously spam you until you have a full email account and then we can fill your email queue with more spam."]
Did you notice the thing about one of his Chinese "hosts" getting raided on suspicion of Falon Gong activity.
I remember when somebody on Slashdot suggested mentioning the Falun Gong in spam complaints about Chinese spammers. The idea would be that it would harrass the spammer AND tie up the Chinese censors in knots. It apparently worked...
Anybody know of any other organizations the Chinese secret service considers subversive?
I'll bet sending encryted data to the Chinese spammers would have a really cool effect, too.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
Maryland Internet Marketing LLC, George Alan Moore Jr, 300 Twin Oaks Rd, Linthicum MD, 21090-2154, 877-655-3438, 410-963-8226.
His domains include softwareincorporated.com and ultimatediets.com. He usually sells McAfee VirusScan. If he's spammed you since October, you can sue.
...some of the sites that claim to list "spam houses" have exceedingly liberal definitions.
Remember: reputable organizations will provide evidence when requested (mere whois listings do not suffice; actual copies of spam are needed to determine one's culpability). Beware of anyone who refuses to even provide contact info.
Cant some blackhats "insert" the GPS co-ordinates for that address into a faked satellite phone conversation from /bin/laden?
I hear the last call made went with a bit of a bang.