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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."
Last time I checked, it was legal to e-mail someone you don't know.
Seriously -- whether you like Ralsky or not, this practice of seizing computer equipment is probably unconstitutional. He is being deprived of his property and his ability to make a living, without due process of law. According to TFA, all of his computer were seized, shutting him down.
We may object to Ralsky's nefarious tactics, but the point is that SourceForge could in principle be next.
I just phoned the Detroit office of the FBI who raided Ralsky's home at (313) 965-2323 and told the responding agent that I was so unbelievably happy that their office raided Alan Ralsky.
The agent was amazed and replied "uh thank you. We don't get calls like this very often."
OMG. Wow.
This is an excellent opportunity to show your support that we STRONGLY support their action and efforts!
If they know their is huge public support for this, that may help them to shut down more of these spammers!
This is AWESOME!
Just call and say thanks and this will keep things moving in the right direction.
w00t!
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
i would just like to say:
:)
You did WHAT???
i haven't had the time to read the comments so this joke has probably been already said, but:
you've slashdoted him via snail mail
Hmm... don't you think it's kinda strange that the worlds number one spam arsehole is arrested just days before important discussions concerning the future of the Internet are held particularly when a number of countries have expressed serious concerns at the lack of aciton against SPAM + PORN?
Brazil: "For those that are still wondering what Triple-X means, let's be specific, Mr. Chairman. They are talking about pornography. These are things that go very deep in our values in many of our countries."
Syria: "There's more and more spam every day. Who are the victims? Developing and least-developed countries, too. There is no serious intention to stop this spam by those who are the transporters of the spam, because they benefit...The only solution is for us to buy equipment from the countries which send this spam in order to deal with spam. However, this, we believe, is not acceptable.
Find more comments here
P.S thank you to the posters of this insightful post and this one.
P.P.S Just a personal message to Alan: Hope you die in prison you scum sucking lazy obese cocksucker.
That's a rather tired cliche, and rather corporate too. It's the little guy's fault, of course, for being human. Not every country in the world is soft on spam and allows torrents of it, unlike the USA and a few others. A equally effective remedy is to put enforcement in place that makes the spammer realize that he has a high risk of being caught and if caught will get the book thrown at him. It's not as if we don't know who a lot of these people are, and in many cases we've known who they are for years. The issue is just as much to do with political will as anything else. Indeed a foreign observer might wonder whether some of the spam kings enjoy political protection (in the Russian Federation, SE Asia and elsewhere, as well as the US), since so many apparently operate with impunity.
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he causes economic damage to the nation.
By that token you could go after many companies. You could argue Microsoft causes economic damage by failing to properly secure its software which results in companies losing millions in lost productivity.
People should have a right to contact anybody anytime about anything. How much spam have you had from this one guy? I mean if someone is diliberately filling your inbox with junk I agree with you. But spam is a distributed problem. And don't give me this deterent-crap. Locking people up for spam is like locking people up for drugs and will have little affect in the long run. In the end, it's up to individuals to take responsibility not big brother.
Alan Ralsky is one of the most egregious and pernicious of the spam scum out there. He tops the ROKSO (Registry of Known Spam Offenders) lists and is responsible for a very large volume of spam originating from APNIC netspace. Much of his spam hosting is overseas and he regularly emits spam by relaying it through zombied systems open relays or proxies. As you will see from the article some of his own state's anti-spam legislation were actually created with him solely in mind.
I can only hope we see more of this in kind, especially Waggoner, Marin, Scelson, Lin, Martino and ESPECIALLY Soloway who, like Ralsky, has always been quite the unapologetic spammer.
As an earlier poster said, thank you to the FBI for their hard work, and also for starting to take this problem seriously.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Last year, the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority ("Ficora") issued an order to all finnish ISPs, stating that they should block all outgoing connections to port 25, barring the ISP's own SMTP server, from any privately used internet connections. This very effectively blocks any zombie machines from sending out junk email directly to MX servers.
One drawback is, however, that I have to change the outgoing SMTP server whenever I take my laptop from home to work and vice-versa.