HOWTO: Annoy a Spammer

Bob writes "I think everyone by now has heard of the millionaire spammer Alan Ralsky. Here's a follow-up to the previous story. It seems that since the story was posted, people have signed him up for every advertising campaign and mailing list out there. And he doesn't like it." They're talking about this Slashdot story.

Comments

How's he going to know who to sue?

[hether]

"Ralsky is indeed annoyed. He says he's asked Bloomfield Hills attorney Robert Harrison to sue the anti-spammers."

How does he plan to identify who to sue? And is he really going to pay to have his lawyer track down the 300+ slashdot users who posted "anti-Ralsky posts"? This just seems silly.

Curing Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Spam is profitable if ~.004% of the recipients respond (and buy the product).
It is impossible to stop this .004% from responding.
Is Spamming profitable when 100-1000% of the spams get replies?
If a company sees that it loses several thousand dollars in bandwidth costs, broken equipment AND the people who want to buy can't place orders, AND the spammer demands unreasonable amounts for the millions of replies, said company MUST stop paying for spam. When enough companies stop, spam will stop.

Time to set up a SLASHDDOS effect.

Re:Eating his own waste

[Anonvmous Coward]

"He's going to sue whom? He has to find them first. And then prove that they did it. And prove that he is suffereing damages."

Hopefully when he thinks about that, he'll realize the fundamental problem with a business like that: There's no verification process.

Let me give you an example: I did an experiment with Slashdot a few weeks ago. I created a brand new, never before used email address and made it visible in my info w/o the anti-spam armor. Within days, I was on a mailing list for volunteer fire fighters. Volunteer Firefighters? I'm reaaaaaaaaaaally curious how I ended up with that. heh.

It's too easy to sign up anonymously. Because of that, it's too hard to sue somebody over a stunt like that. Want my opinion? Blast a few other people in the same way until they realize that the only way to deal with this problem is to make the signup process more secure. When that happens, (hopefully) we'll see less unsolicited advertisements.

Maybe I'm too optimistic.

My own little spam tale

[Overzeetop]

I recently received my first off-color spam email at my "main" address (three years, pr0n spam free). There was a "remove-me" link to a blind web-page, but that seemed beyond foolish. I almost just deleted the email, but realized that I didn't want to leave this unanswered.

I opened the html body, then did a whois search on all six domains in the email. Four were owned by the "sender." One was for the content company, another for a payment processing company. I also looked up Virginia spam laws. There is one, section 18.2-152.4: Computer Trespass. It states

A. It shall be unlawful for any person to use a computer or computer network without authority and with the intent to:

7. Falsify or forge electronic mail transmission information or other routing information in any manner in connection with the transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic mail through or into the computer network of an electronic mail service provider or its subscribers.

The offense is a class 6 misdemeanor. In addition section 152.12 has civil relief and damages of legal fees, court costs, and the greater of actual damages or $10 per email (limited to $25,000/day) payable both the receiver and the email provider.

I replied, as the postmaster of my domain, that the email was unwanted, and I was not to receive any transmissions in the future to any emails in this domain. I sent the email to the admin contact of each domain, and to the return-to addressee with a return receipt. I notified them that, should I not receive a response from the return-addressee, the email would be assumed to include "falsified mail transmission information" and would be in violation of the applicable Virginia statute.

A week later I received an inquiry from the payment processor asking for the email body in order to identify the spammer. A day after sending the body text, I received a nice email from the same company, apologizing for the inconvenience and informing me that the spammers account had been frozen, as he was in violation of his terms of service.

It's a shame he hadn't sent me a couple hundred emails at once, so I could have filed in civil court for a couple of grand. Spending 30 minutes to piss him off is worth my time, but filing in court for $10 isn't.

Not even close

[drew_kime]

Imagine if everyone felt they had the right to take the law into their own hands and dispense justice as they saw fit our legal system would become unbalanced. Individuals would place differing penalties based on their own moral judgments, not based on a standard of law.

Check out the background a little bit. From the original article:

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.

So it seems Ralsky is the one who has engaged in illegal activity. Further:

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.

So he also has a history of fraudulent business practices in multiple other businesses before coming to SPAM.

Now from you:

Indeed, not a short month or so ago the RIAA was proposing congress pass legislation which would enable them to hunt down and possibly destroy or disable a system they believe to be involved with infringing intellectual property.

This example is of a company trying to get a law changed to make it legal for them, and only them, to hack into other people's computer systems. The people who signed Ralsky up for all this junk mail did not enter his home or his systems, did not illegally release any information that was not pulicly available, and did not violate -- nor attempt to have changed -- any laws preventing what they did.

How exactly is this the same?

Re:5 years? You are an optimist

[Jucius Maximus]

"This man suffers from a common human ailment. He does not have the ability to see what he does as wrong. Everyone else is a rube for him to exploit. He (in his own mind) can do whatever he wants, but if someone dares try the same stunt on him, they're going DOWN."

It's called a Dogbert complex.

Re:Spam the spammer

[Jucius Maximus]

"This is one way to deal with spam, but if you spam a spammer, you will become a spammer (...) So @ the end the whole internet will slow down. I think we can better look for better alternatives."

An alternative might be to poison his system. Keep in mind that Ralksy sells spamming services. He sells the service of using e-mail to advertise products that other companies sell. He doesn't actually sell penis enlargers and fake diplomas himself.

So we could poison this system by actually responding to every spam and providing erroneous payment details, mailing details, etc to the companies who want to hawk their products by spam. Obviously they would waste plenty of money processing and shipping these orders, only to find out that they are getting no profit for it. This way, Ralksy's customers go under. Essentially, Ralksy's air supply would be cut off.

THis is a project for slashdot.

[Unknown Poltroon]

Build a program/milserver, that automatically takes any mail sent to it, and sends out a polite reply asking for more informainon to be mailed to a bogus snail mail address, and maybe a phone callback. Vary the message every day, so they cant catch on. Any replies sent to the box get a different message, insisting on snail mail. How much bandwidth would this suck? ANd how may of these would have to be set up inorder to take down the spam industry? if they got 10% bogus replies, would that be enough?

Would it be insult to injury??

[Xandar01]

What if Slashdot did an Ask Alan Ralsky? We could make sure that he is truly enjoying all the oportunities that he's being presented with. Maybe CmdrTaco can call during dinner for an "informational survey."

You think he'd actually answer the questions?

Re:This is different

[The Monster]

it's a lot more work to sort through physical mail and throw it out.

It also costs the senders more than it does the receivers - he pays absolutely nothing for unsolicited p-mail, and if he has a fireplace in that new house of his, can use it for kindling. In fact, I have heard of someone who deliberately got on mailing lists, bundled up the junk mail, and used it in his wood-burning stove to heat his house.