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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.