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."

Comments

What about the FBI or IRS?

[gottafixthat]

Okay, this may be a silly question, and one that has been asked many times before, but I haven't seen it here.

In every interview with Ralsky that I've read, I've seen him mention that he had to use open proxies, open relays, etc, etc. He doesn't seem to ever admit to having any systems that do the actual mail sending, instead he has always stated that he hijacks other systems to send out his garbage. There are many computer tresspass laws on the books here in the US already, and Ralsky is in the US. With his public statements, why hasn't the FBI picked him up for computer tresspassing charges?

With all he has done, it would not surprise me in the least if the examination of his computer network revealed the source for at least a few of the worms/viruses used to turn an Outlook Express user's computer into a spam sending drone. Again, there are laws on the books already that cover these sorts of illegal activities in the US.

Another thought that popped into my head, is why the IRS hasn't come after him for tax evasion? With all of his wealth, and his admitted morals, you know he hasn't claimed all of his income on his 1040's. A nice tax audit in the face of an FBI investigation would likely reveal all of those companies that are paying him to break the law and send their garbage out through these (essentially) hacked systems. They could also be brought up on charges as accomplices in any computer tresspass actions.

I guess the biggest problem is that there would need to be damages shown. Well, having run a regional ISP's mail servers for the last 10 years I can tell you, there are a lot of damages to be accounted for that are the direct cause of spam. The countless hours writing and implementing anti-spam filters, the angry customer phone calls, and all of the emails we get accusing us of selling our customer lists to spammers, etc. Not to mention the lost revenue from people switching providers because they were getting too much spam. The damages to our company over the last few years alone amounts to tens of thousands of dollars if not more. The AOL's, Verizon Online's, etc. have lost a lot more.

Its next to impossible to quantify in exact dollar amounts though. The process goes like this, "our mail servers need to be upgraded because the volume of mail is higher". Can it be attributed directly to spam, or to a growing customer base? Things may get easier after January 1st for us, but I'm certainly not holding my breath.

So if anyone out there sees this, and has a cousin or friend that works for the FBI or the IRS, you may want to turn them on to Ralsky and crew. Make him an example and others may (but probably won't) be deterred from entering the same line of (ahem) "work".

Re:Spammers create jobs (NT)

[Anonymous Coward]

As an asside, spam would be an excellent way to communicate with terrorist sleeper cells. Nobody reads it, everybody gets it. Nobody could tell that a message was even sent. If somehow they did know, they wouldn't know to whom it was sent. Ever notice the random words or characters added to spam to attempt to fool spam filters? It would be trivial to make it a code instead.

Good for you

[Vainglorious Coward]

Good for you, but not so good for others

I receive around 70,000 spam messages to my account monthly...I use TMDA...AT LEAST 75% of the email received here is spam

In other words, you send out over fifty thousand "challenge" emails a month, most all of which will be to innocent third parties who were unfortunate enough to be joe-jobbed. Not only are you bombarding others' inboxes with crap they never asked for, you are effectively doubling your own bandwidth consumed by spam. TMDA not only doesn't solve the spam problem, it actively makes the situation worse.

Opt-Out one list and find yourself in another

[Camel Pilot]

I will never Opt-out a list because these scum^h^h^h businessmen will take you off their list and sell or trade your e-mail to other spammer. An e-mail of someone who opt-out's is valuable because it says

The e-mail adddress is valid

The message slipped thru the filters

And the e-mail owner reads their e-mail