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Alan Ralsky Gripes About Can Spam Act
fdiskne1 writes "The New York Times has an interview with Alan Ralsky, commonly known as the world's worst spammer. CNet News.com is running the same interview. Ralsky admits using open relays and virus-infected PCs and not honoring unsubscribe lists. He complains about having to comply with the new CAN-SPAM law will cost him an additional $3000 in costs to set up a genuine opt-out list. Anyone here feel sorry for him? Okay, I'm biased, but I can't wait until we see him in prison."
Here's a start
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.......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.
Alan M. Ralsky
6747 Minnow Pond Dr.
West Bloomfield, MI 48322-2663
248-926-0688
amr777@comcast.net
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
I read this in my deadtree NYT this morning. In one part, he pats himself on the back for being an ethical spammer, and allowing his targets to opt out. He even went so far as to say, if you dont want my stuff, I dont want to send it to you.
Then, just a few column-inches later, there he is whining about the cost of setting up an opt-out mechanism now that he is being forced to do so. Sounds to me like a clear and blatant lie, and the reported didnt point bother to point it out.
Did publish it, though...
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.
Want to bet that was Windows Messenger? (no, not the IM service, the net send command in DOS)
Here is a list of the Attorney Generals around the country and the world. Everyone should contact their AG and demand that they prosecute these crimes. Until the public puts pressure on the authorities to enforce the crimes these spammers commit, nothing is going to change.
http://www.wonker.com/spamking.asp -- this was covered here before though. Couldn't find the /. article...
...he's just a symptom. Imprison him and someone else will pick up his lost business contacts and opportunities. U.S. laws will simply mean his revenue taxes will go to some other country.
Wrong. Imprison these people and this will deter others - we're not talking about crack addicts. These guys break into computer networks and steal resources and they go on television and in the media because the authorities don't enforce the laws. There will always be spammers but there won't be as much spam and big operations won't be able to exist.
You are right that we need authentication. We need a national registry of responsible smtp relays and users can choose to only accept mail from relays that follow ethical practices. That's the other half of the solution.
Somebody asked for his address, I supplied it (from Spamhaus/ROKSO), and that counts as flamebait?? Sheesh....
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
No, you've got it subtly wrong. It was meant to help mainsleeze, which are large companies that spam but under the auspices[1] of "email marketing" or "permission based marketing" or whatever they want to call it. These companies don't mind providing unsubscribe links, and they don't use proxies. The more they can clamp down on the "porn 'n' pills" group of lowlifes, the more it makes their flavor of spam seem legitimate. "See look, you're no longer getting all of those pornographic emails, we cleaned it up!" Meanwhile they spam away, knowing that their form of spam has been legitimized.
[1] Some of you may say that corporate email marketing for actual legal products or services is legitimate as long as it provides an unsub link. This is false. The only kind of email marketing that is NOT spam is "closed-loop, confirmed opt-in". This means you can't just stick a "sign up for our newsletter" box on your home page and then send away to any email addresses submitted. Before being added to the list you must send a confirmation email to each new address, and the person must reply or repond some way (with a unique, unforgeable token.) If you do not do this you are a spammer, regardless of what you may think.
Name: Alan Murray Ralsky
6747 Minnow Pond Dr,
West Bloomfield, MI 48322
AKA: Alan Ralsky
5016 Patrick Rd. West Bloomfield, MI 48322
248-661-3355
photograph
moreWe block approximately a quarter million inbound spam messages a day, not counting the millions of messages that we don't ever see because the source IP address is on RBL+, PDL, etc.
For server operators, a major criteria for the effectiveness (cost-effective, etc) of any anti-spam approach is the amount of resources (bandwidth, CPU, disk, hours of human effort) are required.
By that standard, putting ADV on the subject line and telling users "just hit delete" is a failure.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Looks like meat's back on them menu boys!!! (that is for the /.'er who referenced eating his flesh)
6747 Minnow Pond Rd
West Bloomfield, MI
48322
His home phone# is 248-926-0057
His work phone# is 248-926-0668
He also has two celluar phones which I traced back as AT&T Wireless numbers. Not sure if both still in service - give a call, don't forget to block your numbers!!!
248-766-5996
and
248-766-6362
Send SMS Here
I suggest we all gather our junk mail/coupons/fliers and start mailing it to his house, and all start making collect calls to his house/work and cell's. We pay for OUR internet access - and he uses our time/money/bandwidth without consent, its only fair that we return the favor.
If anyone has any viagra (I'm sure someone does) - pleaes mail him some - with a lovely note attached on how to enlarge his penis. Maybe his boyfriend will thank you...
Cheers,
Anon
I run a large corporate mail system - about 25000 user accounts.
I can NOT operate a mail server in this day and age without the use of these blocklists. We use a highly elaborate system rbls - spamhaus, njabl, ordb, along with others and some of my own design - as well as spamassassin and virus filters. Of the > 1000000 emails we process dailt, better than 85% is spam by every metric you choose to go by. I still get tons of it in my mailbox since the 'postmaster' and other administrative addresses are posted in spider-friendly plain text on our websites (I've complained to no avail).Think about that - I get 1 milllion emails a day running through my mail server, 850000 of which are spam.
A few weeks ago, easynet.nl's rbls were taken down, whom I was using as my only means of blocking mails from dynamic ranges, as well as one of my open proxy lists. The load on our mail server went through the roof as we were flooded with hundreds of thousands of junk mails poring in from dynamically assigned ip ranges and hijacked proxies, all of which have NO BUSINESS WHATSOEVER sending my users their garbage.
You have to understand that Ralsky and his criminal contemporaries are costing businesses like mine billions of dollars. Billions with a "B". The authorities have so far proven incapable of dealing with this problem, and this new law won't change a fucking thing. While blocklists are hardly perfect, it's one of the most effective tools I have at my disposal to limit the ammount of money Ralsky and his kind can steal from me and my employers on any given day.
I don't give a rat's ass if you and your "online business" can't adequately manage a confirmed opt-in mailing list. Either hire someone to do it, or get off the 'net until you can.
"Oh my God! The dead have risen! And they're voting Republican!" - Bart Simpson
He wouldn't have a job if companies wouldn't pay him for his services. I wouldn't download 300+ spam messages a day unless someone out there was clicking on them. All falls back on the un-educated computer user. I would imagine they would also have bad credit, problems keeping it up, and an overwhelming curiosity to see a naked Paris Hilton.
*DrugCheese rants*
Personally, I get nearly 200 spam messages daily. I know people who get spam into the thousands. He is costing me, and my associates, a *LOT* of resources.
- Bandwidth -- That junk mail, more specifically all the images in the email, take bandwidth. About 20K per message. Multiply by trillions (quadrillions?) of spam each year. Multiply by the number of hops that messages must go through, from my ISP, through my shared T1 where I pay per megabyte. Hint -- It's a lot of wasted bandwidth.
- Direct Time & money -- Thanks to my business, I can't run a spam filter, for fear of it catching stupid people's email. I've tried it, but I just can't configure SA such that it blocks the spam and doesn't block the idiots who have open relay ports, speak in ALL CAPS, and include a few URLs in their messages. I spend probably a few hours each week on spam, which costs my company a lot of money. Repeat for millions of internet users. I've heard the cost here in the 13 or 14-figure dollars per year.
- Indirect money -- I think just about everybody has deleted a legitamate message when culling out the spam. How many important messages have been accidentally deleted? How much money has this cost? Nobody knows.
I have no problem with the ads you mentioned (billboards, TV, radio, junk mail, etc.) Why not? Because the person who sends it pays all the cost. The net cost of sending a trillion spam is nothing; it costs more to collect and maintain the list of names. The cost of putting up a billboard is several thousand bucks. The cost of a radio ad (locally, in a fairly popular show) was $15,000 for a series of 15-second spots, to run for two months. The cost of a TV ad is similarly priced, I'm sure. My company has sent out mass mailings to its customers, and and that also costs us thousands of dollars. I've seen checks cut to the post office for thousands of dollars in postage.The difference is clear. Traditional ads cost the advertiser. The spammers cost society more money than the US national debt -- every year.
These people are essentially embezzeling money from every corporation and individual who has email. You don't think that deserves jail time?
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Actually, as a _legitimate_ commercial mailer, the company I work for is pretty excited about the new act. Mostly, it gets us away from the stupidly crazy California law (which claims authority over email which merely passes through California, even if it is neither the origin or the destination - just if the packets go through there).
For those of us who already have rigorously-adhered to unsubscribe lists and rigorous rules about what email addresses you can legitimately send to, the CAN-SPAM act helps us - because it limits the amount of real spam that people get.
You see, one of the worst problems for a legitimate commercial emailer is spam, because it lessens the effectiveness of email in general. We like to get open rates of at least 80%, and click-throughs of at least 20% (preferably 30%) of the TOTAL SENT (some people only count click-throughs as a percentage of opens, and while that metric has some value for validating message content, the real test is the click-through rates based on the total). If people are flooded with spam, it makes them overall less responsive to legitimate email.
I was giving a lecture on doing email marketing without spam, and was shocked to learn that someone in the audience had one of his IT guys write a program for him to do web-email-harvesting! It's even happening in the mom and pop shops. Pretty scary. We also ran into an Internet Service Provider who was automatically subscribing people to a third-party mailing list without their authorization or approval.
It's pretty scary out there.
Engineering and the Ultimate
>>Alan Ralsky, commonly known as the world's worst spammer.
Ralsky's not the world's worst. That dubious honor goes to Eddy Marin of Boca Raton FL, convicted coke dealer, and generally believed to be the main impetus behind the SLAPP suit against the "nanae nine." Google around for 'rokso marin'.
The reason for Ralsky's supposed contriteness in the NYT interview is not any sense of having seen the error of his ways; the reason he's running scared is the recent lawsuit against fellow spambag Scott Richter of Denver CO.
All three of them need to be dressed up in frilly lingerie and dropped into Bubba's cell along with a bucket of chilled champagne.
Now, that we've got that out of the way, please, please, please, stop exaggerating the problem to the point of insanity in terms of cost.
Last time I checked, the world GDP is roughly $4 Quadrillion (a 16 digit number) dollars a year, I'm willing to go on record right now, and say that there is no way SPAM represents 1% of the world's economy.
According to http://www.bea.gov (gov't economic data collector), the 2002 GDP was $10 Trillion (roughly the 14 digit number you claimed Spam cost on a yearly basis).
I'm willing to bet that 25% of all Spam is recieved by some one in the U.S. That means that 25% of the US economy is represented via SPAM. If that is actually true, stopping SPAM would cause a world wide depression of a magnitude never before conceived of. You should never ever stop SPAM if it actually constituted that much of the US economy. The costs of SPAM are actually, money that is spent, and is recorded as a profit by some other company, or is money spent on an employee. It's only bad if the profit or employee are in another country.
It's very, very important that the money be spent. The entire economy works when the money moves around it. The economy doesn't work when money sits in big piles. If what you are saying is true, Intel, Microsoft, Dell, IBM, and millions of IT workers worldwide owe their corporate profits, and personal paychecks directly to SPAM. Pardon me if I call nonsense at this point.
I'm going to go on record saying, that's patently false, but it's the only logical conclusion of what you are saying. Thus, what your saying is absurd. I'm willing to admit what you are saying is true in it's basic premise, but the details are a bit irrational.
SPAM, might cost lots of money. However, a lot of that money is going to an ISP. It's not like it's lost money that is never found. It's not like the Spammers get that money. IT companies do, sysadmins do, all kinds of people get that money.
If spamming up and disappeared, you are claiming that a huge portion of the national GDP would evaporate, because 99% of all that money is just cycling around the system. Somebody in the US got paid that money. That's really, really good for the US economy. That money not going around is really, really, really bad.
It's surely not being embezzled by the Spammers. Spammers only get the money from the morons who pay them (either by paying referral fees for advertising, or from the people who actually purchase a product from them).
Yes SPAM represents an inefficiency in the economy, but, it can't be of the magnitude you are talking about. Most of the inefficiency is given to other corporations, or given to employees as money to be respent in the economy. All of which is good. About the only people who truely would lose out is, people who run small business with no employees (thus dealing with SPAM costs them money directly, and prevents them from generating value that contributed to the GDP, however the portion that goes to the ISP is actually a contribution to the GDP, and thus good for the economy).
Kirby
Good point.
The owner was Leo Kuvayev and the buisness was 2kservices.com also known as elkasys.com, memberpro.com and ecashservices.com
Not that it matters.. the guy has his own spews listing