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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."
Will I be notified, if they find out I'm a victim??
:-)
Hell the guy from nigeria didn't write me for a while, I'll send him an E-Mail. I'm still waiting for a large transaction
I am heir to the FBI throne which was recently desposed. FOr only $2000 down, you can secure your right to this massive wealth as well.
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
Did they get his Spam Crown and Scepter?
NOW who will fill my inbox?!
Wah Sig!
I had thought my Inbox was rather empty today...
-- Seq
...unless they shot him.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
"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.
I mean, I'm sure he opted out of FBI raids on questionable business practices....
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.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
If you know this happened, you can be sure they had a warrant. That means there was due process.
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...
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.
The world would be a better place when spam is gone.
Subzerorz
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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.
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
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?
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
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.
This is the proposed message:
DeAR u.ser
Precvio3sly you have b33n victim of unsol.citated e-mail, so called s.pam selling u v1agra and p.enis enlarg.ements products, us.iNG aNNoying layouts ant teipos to confu..se your s.p.a.m..filters.
The FBI now offers you the ReA.L links to the places where you can buy your V.1agrA and P.eniSEnlar.gement produCTs for the real pr1ce without the middle S.P.am man.
Please go to v1agrahfDUgfapitdrGPSRGf.fbi.gov for the fastest S$hop
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
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.
Because it was the FBI, they were enforcing federal law, not a local law that the Michigan lawmakers may have passed.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Ya, a bullet to the head is less expensive to the tax payers and makes other human waste of space think twice.
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.
So let's only imprison him for one hour..
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
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.
he had a "prior business arrangement" with them.
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"
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.
How about we imprison him for one half second, the time it takes to hit delete ...per message
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
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.
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.
No "shot while resisting arrest"? Too bad.
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.
Fight Spammers!
I for one applaud the efforts of our FBI Overlords and welcome more news like this in the future.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
" 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.
There was no mention of it in the article, so it probably wasn't used in Ralsky's case, but....
In the US, law enforcement working for any level of government can seize whatever they want under the RICO Act. They simply have to say "this object was related to selling drugs" and its their's. Doesn't have to be true. Doesn't require a trial. Doesn't even need evidence to support the statement. It is just gone. And good luck getting it back if it isn't related to drugs. http://www.fear.org
I believe it is unconstitutional, but it happens on a very regular basis. One day I hope someone is able to bring it to the US Supreme Court and have all forfeiture laws abolished. But while it exists, it couldn't happen to a more deserving person if they did permanently seize Ralsky's equipment. Even bad laws can be useful occasionally.
Only on
We have to turf about 94% of all incoming email. I personally get more than 1 Mb of spam filtered to my junk folder a day for manual perusal in case any important messages got tagged by mistake.
Twenty years in prison is peanuts for the suffering these monsters have caused. Put me in a room with this poor excuse for a human and a big woodchipper and I'd be entertained for several whole minutes. No need to look in on us.
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.
This is the FBI. Come out with your penis enlarged!
Table-ized A.I.
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?
Maybe his sentence will be to send out thousands of unsolicited emails apologies for all the SPAM he has sent.
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.