FBI Raids Home of Spam King Alan Ralsky

wstearns writes "The Detroit News is reporting that the FBI has raided Alan Ralsky's home. In the raid, the FBI took computers and financial records, effectively shutting him down. Mr. Ralsky has been frequently covered here."

Comments

Re:Charged with what?

[Coneasfast]

Last time I checked, it was legal to e-mail someone you don't know.

if you read the article (not slashdotted yet):

The law also forbids spammers from using multiple e-mail addresses or domain names to camouflage their identities. Penalties include up to 20 years' imprisonment and an $11,000 fine per offense.

Warrants show FBI agents sought evidence Ralsky and Bradley sent commercial e-mail using at least 14 domain names.

Re:Too bad... (deprived of property w/o due proces

[bersl2]

Warrants unsealed last week revealed that agents in September seized computers, laptops, financial records and disks from the 8,000-square-foot home of Alan M. Ralsky.

Apparently, he is getting due process.

Ralsky isn't the worst..

[Dynamoo]

Ralksy isn't the worst of the bunch.. perhaps his BIGGEST mistake is actually having some sort of media profile. There are plenty of spammers out there who are even more despicable than him, but it seems that Ralsky is an easy target. Perhaps they should consider going after Robert Soloway or Alec Defrawy next?

Re:Waste of tax dollars

[humankind]

Ignorant, uninformed responses like yours really tick me off.

As an ISP that has to spend twice as much on bandwidth and resources as I need because of the bandwidth spammers consume, I can certify that it costs me a lot of money.

Upwards of 70-80% of all mail traffic on the net is spam. Probably at least one third of all Internet traffic may end up being bandwidth and resources these scumbags steal, usually by exploiting armies of compromised, zombied PCs to do their distribution.

Don't even get me started about the countless hours of tech support, computer downtime and other wasted resources due to innocent (and sometimes naive) computer users who have inadvertently had trojan software/plug-ins or worms invade their machines... This is all the work primarily of spammers.

It's not a simple case of installing a mail filter. That doesn't do a goddam thing to stop spamming. This is like you turning off your television as a way to stop the war in Iraq. Good luck.

you don't understand investigations.

[www.sorehands.com]

I had a tour of the FBI's cyber crime office in Boston -- they got some neat toys.

They didn't just take away his stuff. They took away his stuff, to then copy it onto network storage. Then copy the drives onto otpical media. Then copy it onto hard drives. All while leaving the originals unmodified. Then they will analyze the data to gather evidence.

It would be real sweet to know the domains that they used so that every spam victim can file suit against Ralsky and Bradley. We can take out spammers with distributed lawsuits. A spammer can survive 1,2 or maybe 10 lawsuits, but can they survive 100? I, with help, took out Avtech.

I tracked down a big time ink spammer, going under the name of payless inks, top quality inks, inks on sale. I posted the strings to search for on my spam page so that any spam victim can file suit. If you file suit, contact me and I'd be happy to serve the summons and complaint.