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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."
"Effectively" shut down? So he's free to just buy new servers, host them elsewhere and restart his spamming or have they slapped an injunction off him telling him to stop?
He must have been spamming something obscene, because the FBI doesn't have the resources to deal with spammers while they're on this moral crusade to re-puritanize this god fearing country.
Besides, spamming is okay as long as you're a big corporation that either does or may contribute or lobby congress at some point.
Spamming is only bad if you're a private citizen doing it, sort of like how raping teenage babysitters, doing coke, driving drunk and killing women when you drive off a bridge and wander away is only bad for private citizens.
If you know this happened, you can be sure they had a warrant. That means there was due process.
The world would be a better place when spam is gone.
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The spam problem will never be halted by arresting the spammers. There's so much money to be made that there'll always be someone to step up to the plate as soon as a spammer is taken down. The only way to stop spam is to stop it being profitable. Stop people buying from spam adverts and noone will bother to send the adverts. The only ways to do that though is to stop people seeing the adverts (spam filtering), or to educate them that 99.9% of products advertised are a complete rip-off .. and the 0.1% that aren't should be avoided because the company selling them resorts to spamming to sell stuff.
Much as it's great to see a suspected criminal arrested for sending this crap out, there's no chance that it'll actually made any significant dent in the torrent of spam flowing through mail servers every day.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
This is a very good sign.
The reason spammers operate is because it has been profitable for them due to their operating expenses (apathetic law enforcement, hazy jurisdiction, theft of third-party bandwidth and resources).
As more of these people get raided and have to deal with serious legal and criminal issues, the "cost" of operating will go up substantially, and as a result, it will not be as profitable for them to operate.
Let's hope the FBI follows through on this and puts this guy in jail. There's no doubt he committed a ton of crimes, including computer tampering, pornography, identity theft, etc. Spammers routinely break loads of laws in operating their business. Finally, we're seeing some agencies start to enforce these laws.
Yeah, because I'd love it if my employer could be shut down and put me out of a job simply because he was accused but was not neccesarily guilty of a crime.
From the Wikipedia article on due process:
Was he notified before the raid? Did he get a chance to be heard and to oppose the raid before it happened? I know he will have an opportunity to do so in the trial (if there is one), but the point is that even now his livelihood has already been destroyed.
I know it's hard to sympathise with Ralsky, but this could also happen to many other people if they are sued by the RIAA or MPAA, using exactly the same legal principle.
I hardly get any spam at all. I use spamassassin on my server and junkmatcher on my client.
If you hardly get any spam at all, then why do you need *TWO* spam filters?
You *GET* lots of spam - just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.
Just call and say thanks and this will keep things moving in the right direction.
Hold your horses. Why was he "raided"? What law did he break? Did you break the same law last week?
I hate spammers with a passion, but I like my freedom a little more than they are irritating to me.
Ya, a bullet to the head is less expensive to the tax payers and makes other human waste of space think twice.
... Or put him in prison and give those pills to his cellmates.
The article is a bit thin on details, tho. It's mostly background info on Ralsky. Why was he raided? CAN-SPAM violations? Or was he found suspect of something else (fraud, maybe?)
"60 year old, gregarious, heavy smoker". Methinks nature will take him out soon enough.
No sig
Stiff punishments exist as much to be carried out as they do to DETER people from comitting crime. If you know that you can be sent to prison for 20 years for doing something, you'll be less likely to do it. If you know that you'll get probation and community service, or even a couple of months of jail time, you know that the millions you can make on your illegal activities will probably justify this risk.
UNIX: A computer user is defined as a programmer. WINDOWS: A computer user is defined as a consumer.
The FBI will be performing a raid on your crack house at 123 N. Main, on October 27th at 11:45pm. We better not finding anything illegal there.
Your friendly Federal Bureal of Investigation
I'm sorry but are you a fucking retard? The point of a raid is to go in and find indisputalable evidence that the crime was committed. A warrent will show that there is some evidence to it happening, but the raid will produce the evidence that will make the trail happen and get the assholes into jail. Or are you just afraid the FBI will raid your house and steal your computer to arrest you for all your downloaded p0rn, and MP3s.
The punishment may seem "absurd" to you but perhaps not to others. If you consider that he is effectively stealing bandwidth and computing resources from email servers and client recipients then he's stealing on a massive scale. Perhaps if you rolled the clock back a few years and were paying per minute or something on your dialup you'd feel differently. Just because fairly ubiquitous bandwidth makes it *less* of a nuisance than it was not too many years ago doesn't make it any less not his bandwidth and disk space, and cpu cycles, etc.
If the kits didn't exist, they would have to send the sample to the lab to have it analyzed. That's what they are doing with the hard drives since there is no step 1,2,3 test kit to prove this crime.
It comes down to the police having enough good evidence to convience a judge that the crime most likely did happened and that he should write a search warrent. I have no problem at all with that as long as the police and the judge are technically savy enough to analyze the evidence to know what it really means. If they aren't savy enough, that's when you are likely to get the bad warrents and the bad outcomes.
No, I don't get lots of spam. Most of it is denied at the SMTP protocol level and is never even written to disk. Most of the rest is filtered out based on content and /dev/null'd before it reaches the mailbox delivery step. The client side filter is then left to handle the very small quantity of mail that is difficult to discern with more general measures and makes it past the SMTP and MDA level and is of course then downloaded by the useragent for fine-tuning of the local filter.
Okay, I've seen responses like this in the past, and I'll admit that I have little knowledge of how the whole thing works (because I'm not really interested as long as it works). However, whether those messages are being dumped into my throw-away hotmail account's junk folder or being transported *somewhere*, they are being written to disk somewhere. They are also using up bandwidth during transport, and that bandwidth is not being paid for by the spammers. I don't understand the logic of people who claim spam is not a problem just because they don't see any in their inbox. That seems a bit like claiming that the termites aren't really a problem because your house hasn't fallen down yet.
Yes. It's only spam. Unless you're a family on 56k having to download several hundred kilobytes, or even megabytes, of e-mail you have no use for, no wish to receive, and no convenient way of stopping since your ISP will only offer to sell you their "premium" e-mail with anti-spam services for some extortionate amount.
Not everyone knows how to set up their own mail server, blacklists, or whatever. Not everyone can simply up and switch providers every time their current address gets unusably bogged down with spam.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
This will not prove to be much of a bust. If there were anything of substance in the information there would have been a felony arrest rather than merely a search warrant.
Of course, there are clandestine warrants - entry and installation of a logger followed by entry with a "regular" warrant to collect the data & computers. Perhaps an arrest will follow shortly.
If all the matter comes down to is a nice little fine....
This clown will just up his contribution to the Republicans - just making money as a free rider is status quo ante for the Bushies.
they just took away his stuff, how lame! he committed a crime and should be punished.
Ya know, as big of a sleezeball as we might think he is, the FBI doesn't (nor should it) have the authority to punish him for whatever crimes you think he might have committed.
That role is reserved for juries and judges.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
And although Mr. Ralsky says he is effectively out of business, I trust him and this statement as much as I trust his honorable treatment of email address removal requests - which is no trust at all*. He certainly has backup tapes off site. He also has the means to start right back up - or he should have, considering the money involved. If he doesn't, then he is an idiot, and gets what he deserves. SBC wouldn't go out of business if their bookkeeping computers were seized - same principle here.
I know I expect SourceForge to have backup tapes held off site. If SourceForge and OSDN don't have disaster recovery plans already written and tested - shame on them.
Every business that depends on IT should have a DR plan. Even if law enforcement mistakenly seizes your computers - that doesn't excuse your business from failing. Once you get 'large enough' it is irresponsible to not have a DR plan.
*According to the Spamhaus Project, Mr. Ralsky hosts his email servers in China to evade U.S. law. And as an email administrator, I don't see any evidence that email removal requests result in less spam - quite the opposite, really.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
This guy is not harnless, he causes economic damage to the nation. Those are real-world consequences of having to divert resources that could be used to help businesses grow, into fighting spam. Setting up spam filters costs money, having workers delete dozens of junkmails daily costs money, downloading hundreds of gigs of junk costs money. Whether you like it or not, this guy causes real problems.
Obviously, God needs to kill more kittens.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
All higher costs incurred by the ISP are passed along to the consumer, ergo all of the damage is done to the user, though indirectly.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
No he isn't harmless. He hires virus authors to write programs to infect PCs so he can spam from them. He ddoses networks. He rips people off.
He might not go round clubbing people and taking their money, but he's still a big time criminal, defrauding people of millions of dollars. He's causing economic harm on massive scales, and the people being hurt are more often than not the elderly.
He's also an easy target since he publically boasts about what he does, the FBI would be considered neglectful if they didn't take him down.
" How about we imprison him for one half second, the time it takes to hit delete ...per message"
Are you really that naive? What about the time it takes to sort through hundreds of spam messages to find the legitimate email? What about the time it takes to sort through your spam folder for false positives? What about the money you have to spend for anti-spam software?
You must not get much email from real people if you think dealing with spam is as simple as "hit delete."
Jeez!
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
I have a choice whether I buy Microsoft products or not. I do not have a choice whether I receive spam (short of stopping using email altogether).
The FBI is a rather large orignization. They are capable of doing many things at once. The US attorney's office has made it clear they are going to persue criminal cases against spammers now, and thus the FBI will be investigating.
Now not all spam is legal, as per CAN-SPAM, some is legal. However most isn't. Most of it is fradulant in nature, or does not have the proper opt-outs and such. Thus, it can be subject to a criminal investigation.
But please, stop the stupid hyperbole. The FBI is plenty capable of doing more than one thing at once, including things you like and things you don't. The answer isn't to get all whiny about it, it is to try and get the law changed. The FBI doesn't make the law, they enforce the law. If you disagree with the law don't demand they don't enforce it, demand that our legslature change it. It's quite clear our definitions for obsecity are out of date and need to be updated.
Write your congressmen and let them know this, and make it clear that it is an issue that will influence how you vote. Oh and pleaes leave out the hyperbole and personal attacks. That won't win you any points. You want to appear professional and rational. Let them know you have good reasons for believing what you do and that it is something they'd better pay attention to.
First they came for the child pornography wierdos
and I did not speak out
because I did not look at child Pornography
Then they came for the spammers
and I did not speak out
because I did not spam
Then they came for the GNAA
and I did not speak out
because I was not a troll
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Hmm.... I tried to make this comment earlier but was unable to post for a while, so here's take 3:
The point is that FBI seizure of computers for evidence is extremely disruptive, and (since the computers are generally kept for at least a full obsolescence cycle and often damaged) amounts to taking stuff and not giving it back. We've all heard stories about people and organizations who lose lots of stuff for no good reason. The most famous recent one was Indymedia but there are others. That sort of thing is not supposed to happen.
should be directed to:
Alan Murray Ralsky
6747 Minnow Pond Dr,
West Bloomfield, MI 48322
Telephone: 248-926-0688 * Confirmed
Remember console frequently, and console late at night. Snail Mail gladly accepted. In fact, considering the trash he's sent us, filling his voicemail is entirely appropriate. Read him your spam. Read it slowly.
he has a point, though; half-a-second times, say 50 billion messages would put him in jail for roughly 800 years.
Meanwhile, I suggest one better. jail him for average transmission time between SMTP server and user, and fine him for bandwidth costs.
Do some math now...
call it 0.01 seconds per message, at about 100kB
I presently pay $10/month for 1G of bandwidth/month at my host, making one spam cost 0.095 cents.
That's 15 years and a fine of $47,500,000 for 50 billion spams.
Seems appropriate...
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Watch the entire internet run faster due to this guy's capture, speaking of which I wonder if he get's spam, do spammers spam him?
In order to try and convict him of anything you need evidence, seizing his equipment is not a punishment for him but an attempt to gather evidence of his innocence or guilt. I can't see any other way for this to work.