Russia's Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered

Karellen !-P writes "Vardan Kushnir, a notorious russian spammer who headed the English learning centers, the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head."

Comments

That shouldn't happen.

[FFFish]

It's terrible that something like that would happen. It isn't legal and it isn't moral.

On the other hand, this message is about all the empathy and concern I can work myself up to. Good riddance to bad trash.

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[ucahg]

Are you joking?

Has human life lost all sanctity, that you think it is justifiable to end a man's life because he sends you unwanted email?

Is spam that much of an annoyance to you that you are filled with satisfaction when a man is bludgeoned to death, only because that man was a spammer?

I'm at a loss for words, and I'm ashamed of the morality of the age I live in. You make me sick.

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[Golias]

Russia is currently one of the most "bent" countries in the world. Pretty much nobody does business there of any sort, let alone shady stuff like hacking and spamming, without having connections to the mob.

Keep that in mind next time somebody tells you what a great deal allofmp3.com is. The cost is actually a few pennies a song plus some poor sap's kneecaps somewhere.

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[Elwood P Dowd]

Is spam that much of an annoyance to you that you are filled with satisfaction when a man is bludgeoned to death, only because that man was a spammer?

This person has made a living by harming other people. He has done so for a long time. He would have been delighted to continue harming people for the rest of his life. Murder is clearly a disproportional response but you shouldn't be surprised when people are happy to see a sociopath take it worse than he was giving out.

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[Kadin2048]

No, this is Slashdot, where chances are the people who actually have to write and fine-tune and otherwise spend their day dealing with those filters hang out.

Sure, the majority of people here probably could just turn their filters on, but don't act like the technology to block annoying behavior like the spammers' just falls from the sky. Someone has to make it, and that's their time that the spammer is taking up.

There are a lot of people with legitimate grievances about unwanted bulk email, some greater than others. But when you get a lot of people together who each have a small grievance...it's probably not enough to cause any of them to actually go out and kill the person responsible, but don't expect them to act all sad about it when somebody else (assumedly for their own, probably nefarious reasons) does.

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[AKAImBatman]

The cyrillic letter for 'H' is 'X'.

That's actually a "Khah" sound (e.g. loch ness), not a hard 'H' sound.

A hamburger cost a month's salary, and the only reason there was a long line several hundred people in length is because the Russian people were so supressed that they desperately [y]earned to try something they only read about or seen on TV.

Ehh... that's somewhat true. McDonalds was simply something new and cool at the time. A bit like when the Apple Store opened here in Chicago. Were people lined up at the Apple Store because they were oppressed? Me thinks it had more to do with the Apple Store being new and cool.

It was the same thing with McDonalds. After it existed for a while, it became a much more normal part of Russian life.

I bet you'd find it "progress" if I told you that the cost of the hamburger since then has gone down from a month's sallary to a week's sallary.

I think you're a little behind on the times. Several years ago, the Russian government reissued new currency that has a much better parity when compared to the Dollar. Eating at McDonalds isn't cheap, but it doesn't cost a weeks salary, either.

Sure, there are a handful of millionaires here and there, the vast majority of whom earned their wealth by "stealing" the property and industries that the government abandoned after instituting a more free market.

1. These are generally called "New Russians".

2. Many New Russians obtained their wealth through perfectly honest means. For example, a friend of my wife's family made a killing by starting a door repair/replacement business. Not something you'd think would be a big money-maker, but apparently he became quite weathly from it. Which just goes to show how important property is to Russians now that it's private instead of public.

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[xmorg]

There is no more helpless a fealing than an email user who cant reply to an automated spam message, to tell the sender to get a life, or stop sending the message.

How many times have I wanted to find the guy who does this, and (At the very least) flood his inbox(s) with all the mail he has ever sent me. Killing is wrong yes, but you can't expect to tick off millions of people all over the world, and not suffer some retibution if discovered ... in short spamming could be hazerdous to your health!

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[Cromac]

Killing is wrong yes, but you can't expect to tick off millions of people all over the world, and not suffer some retibution if discovered

If only the spammers would read that and realize the truth of it. I'm sure many of them think what they're doing is harmless and no one could possibly be bothered by it, but as you pointed out when you irritate millions of people chances are at least a few of them we be complete raving psychos.

Re:That shouldn't happen.

[gothfox]

1. I'm not Russian. My wife is. :-)

Well, it's the same in my book, so I more or less guessed right. ;-)

2. That's a bit more extreme than I was trying to communicate.

I know. I commented on grandparent poster's take on my country's internal affairs which usually gets modded up to eleven by same thinking moderators. I read a lot of this post-apocalyptic nonsence here, basically in every thread about Russia, cracks me up every time.

Besides, what other country allows its Presidential candidates to be kidnapped? (Or perhaps allows it's candidates to spin believable stories about kidnapping. You decide.) ;-)

Heh. And what country allows its military-industrial complex to buy out the president elections and generally pwn the public as it pleases?

I think, it's the same shit everywhere, only the level of general, um, civility differs. We lag for about fifty-sixty years, so our bandits are more rough. Bandits of "first world" countries are more civilized, but the principle stays the same.

You know what they say...

[Linus Torvaalds]

Karma's a bitch.

I'm sure there will be plenty of people thinking that somebody got a little too pissed off with spam, but try and remember that these types of spammers associate with organised crime (e.g. by hiring virus writers to get them bot nets).

Re:You know what they say...

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

Knowing Russia and Russians, and I do, he probably got his head bashed in after a drunken argument over someones wife, all generally misinterpreted, with the "injured party" sneaking back afterwards with his friends to do the deed. Russia is a squalid, rotten, barbarous country, where extraordinary levels of physical violence are the accepted norm, and you had better know Russian if you go there, tavaresh, because random passers by will beat you if you don't.

The spamming was probably just incidental.

Because of spamming?

[Tal Cohen]

The post (and the first few replies) seem to assume that he was murdered since he was a spammer. Somehow, I doubt that.

Re:Because of spamming?

[Martin Blank]

My first thought was that he might have been killed because he was a spammer not sharing his profits with the right people. The various Russian mobs are very powerful, very greedy, and very territorial.

Why must we be animals?

[mind21_98]

Violence against anyone is wrong, unless it's in self-defense. I don't think he was killed because he was a spammer--he was probably killed in a robbery or confrontation over some other reason. We'll have to wait until the police find out more about what happened.

Re:Why must we be animals?

[sowellfan]

I'm all for stopping the people that send spam, and spread spyware, trojans, viruses, etc., through legal means.

Unfortunately, legal means aren't doing much to solve the problem that we're facing (increasing identify theft, credit card fraud, computers that have to be re-imaged to start working again, etc.). In fact, even while more and more people work on security issues from the defense side, the epidemic spread of malicious programs continues. When the people that do this stuff operate in the U.S., they're hard to catch, and hard to prosecute. When they're operating in places like Russia, where the law is not in our favor, they are nearly impossible to prosecute effectively through legal means.

If legal means are completely ineffective at creating a deterrent, as they seem to be, then vigilante action becomes a more viable option, IMHO. Granted, the corpse in this story appears to have been a spammer, not an organized-crime trojan writer. As such, I think murder was not warranted. But for the people who *are* writing and spreading trojans, defrauding people, etc., I think that the only true deterrent would be the murder of a significant number of them (enough to get their attention and make them re-think their career choice).

If you think I'm going far here, just think about this: How many man-hours are spent here in the U.S. each year dealing with security issues caused by scum like this? Millions, I'm sure. Each hour spent dealing with these problems is an hour that is effectively stolen from the person who has to deal with that problem - if the problem didn't exist, then they could be doing something of their own choice. So the people that perpetrate this stuff rob us of millions of hours of our lives, while they enjoy all of the hours of their lives. In the big balance sheet of life, we come out ahead if the perps are deceased.

1st 3 comments

[lilmouse]

The first three comments:

1. Shouldn't kill even spammers.
2. This happened b/c he was spamming.
3. Yeah! Kill the bastards!

That about sums up the comments...

FWIW, he was probably offed by a business partner who wanted a bigger cut of the profits, or by the mob, because he wasn't paying them off. This is Russia we're talking about here.

--LWM

Opt-out

[wowbagger]

It sounds to me like he simply failed to opt-out of the "Beat your head in" club.

They must have purchased a list with his name on it, and he failed to opt-out, so they had every right to offer their product to him.

After all, we wouldn't want to deny those people who WANT to have their heads beaten in the opportunity, just because some whiny anti-battery types want such lists to be double opt in.

He should have taken more care with his head - kept it in a metal helmet, only showing it to his friends, changing it periodically. Instead, he had his head out in the open where anybody who wanted to could beat it in.

It's all his fault, and the DMA (Dastardly Murder Association) bears no responsibility for this incident.

Spam

[william_w_bush]

how... sad...ish

my take on this is that we shouldn't blame spammers for spam, we should blame the MOTHER-FUCKING BRAIN-DEAD IDIOTS who actually BUY from them, giving them an economic incentive to fuck the rest of us over.

Honestly, if you know anyone who buys that shit, please kick his ass for us, they support spammers, and are more to blame than 100 whatever-this-guys-name-was.

Re:Spam

[Tim C]

how... sad...ish

The unnecessary death of a human being? Yeah, I'd say it's sad.

Re:Spam

[the pickle]

Unnecessary?

You presume his life was necessary in the first place. I'm gonna go with no. The overwhelmingly vast majority of people are utterly, indescribably insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

This guy was no different.

As another poster so adroitly pointed out, there are something like a quarter of a million people who die every single day in this world. Put in a time-averaged perspective, that's about three people every single second of the day. In the time it takes me to compose a sentence in this post, 30 or 40 people have died.

And you're going to try to say you feel sadness for each and every one of these people?

Bullshit.

I feel sadness for innocent people who die in terrorist attacks. I feel sadness for people who die after long bouts with cancer whilst their loved ones watch them waste away. I feel sorry for people who are murdered because they wore the wrong colour shirt in the wrong part of town.

I sure as shit do not feel one whit of sympathy or sadness for some professional asshat whose goal in life was to annoy the holy hell out of everyone on the Internet. Do you know how much Russian-language spam I've gotten this year? I don't speak or read a word of Russian, but I have to deal with this guy's drivel every goddamn day, and you want me to feel fucking sad because someone beat his worthless ass to death in his apartment?

How about I start shitting on your porch -- and the porch of everyone in your neighbourhood, village, town, city, and state -- every day for the next 10 years? When you and your 10 million friends get done cleaning it off after the 3650th day, and someone fucking snaps and beats me to death, I utterly DEMAND you feel remorse for my unnecessary death.

Never mind that my sole purpose and goal in life at that point was to piss you off. You had goddamn better feel remorse that you're not going to get your porch shit on tomorrow.

People like you are the reason people like him are allowed to continue existing.

And that, my friend, is truly sad.

p

Re:Why would it be the mafia?

[Golias]

The mafia wouldnt beat a person to death, they'd simple make the person vanish off the face of the earth. You'd think the mafia would do a professional hit.

People are beat to death by mafia goons all the time.

The "single pistol shot through the eyeball" execution is the stuff of movies. Mob thugs are no better at crime than regular thugs, they just have infrastructure in place to make it easier.

Yes there is a russian mafia, but if this is the most profitable spammer in russia its simply illogical for them to kill their cashcow.

Now it's my turn to get all Hollywood:

"You're only as good as your last brown envelope."

Well...

[abb3w]

..would it be irony or poetic justice?

Judging by the way my ceremonial can-o-Spam reacts to a magnet, I would say Irony.

Re:That shouldn't happen. Likely just new owners

[Herschel Cohen]

It's a game played by many "businesses", let someone develop the market then take it over by any means.

Your new spam might read like: "Read This, Buy or Die!" Where every word is meant to be taken in the literal sense.

Re:Three Cheers!

[anonicon]

"If I find your post sufficiently objectionable, should I be permitted to kill you too?"

Hmmm, a single post to Slashdot being compared to some professional asshat who spammed millions of people and mail servers around the world. Now THAT'S Slashdot for you.

As for the spammer, I gave you this abridged Clerks retort:
Blue-Collar Man: Excuse me. I don't mean to interrupt, but what were you talking about?
Randal: The ending of Return of the Jedi.
Dante: My friend is trying to convince me that any contractors working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when the space station was destroyed by the rebels.
Blue-Collar Man: Well, I'm a contractor myself. I'm a roofer... (digs into pocket and produces business card) Dunn and Reddy Home Improvements. And speaking as a roofer, I can say that a roofer's personal politics come heavily into play when choosing jobs.
Randal: Like when?
Blue-Collar Man: Three months ago I was offered a job up in the hills. A beautiful house with tons of property. It was a simple reshingling job, but I was told that if it was finished within a day, my price would be doubled. Then I realized whose house it was.
Dante: Whose house was it?
Blue-Collar Man: Dominick Bambino's.
Randal: "Babyface" Bambino? The gangster?
Blue-Collar Man: The same. The money was right, but the risk was too big. I knew who he was, and based on that, I passed the job on to a friend of mine.
Dante: Based on personal politics.
Blue-Collar Man: Right. And that week, the Foresci family put a hit on Babyface's house. My friend was shot and killed. He wasn't even finished shingling.
Randal: No way!
Blue-Collar Man: (paying for coffee) I'm alive because I knew there were risks involved taking on that particular client. My friend wasn't so lucky. (pauses to reflect) You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault. A roofer listens to this... (taps his heart) not his wallet.

The spammer should have listened to the roofer.