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Spam King Busted by Secret Service
An anonymous reader writes "Adam Vitale, aka Batch1 aka Baxter, 25, of Boynton Beach, FL, and his partner Todd Moeller, aka M3rk, of New Jersey, are accused of sending nearly 50,000 pieces of spam e-mail to more than 1.2 million AOL subscribers.
US Secret Service agents used a confidential informant to hire Moeller and Vitale to deliver spam, which advertised a computer security product."
The poor (rich?) sap's booking photo, complete with ::gulp:: his address. Too bad spammers aren't required to disclose their email address on arrest.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
I wonder why illegal spamming comes under the jurisdiction of the Secret Service and not the FBI. This is not a treasury matter after all.
It is about time that the authorities are starting to take a harder look at those thieves of computer ressources. I'm not only talking about the criminal botnet operators, but the "mainsleaze" spam senders.
But the true way of fighting spam is not nuking spammers per se, but rather nuking ISPs who cater to spammers, in any way, be it domain registrations, DNS service and plain web-hosting, both legit and botnets. This will make them think twice in not having a good, hard look at their abuses@* mailboxen.
I have to ask? Why is the secret service involved? They are supposed to protect the money supply and the President and other high offices. Shouldn't this have been a job for the FBI?
Always happy to hear about a spammer being busted, but why does this land in the Secret Service's turf?
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
US Secret Service agents used a confidential informant to hire Moeller
I guess it is good that the Secret Service doesn't have to worry about entrapment rules. It's great to hear that spam is getting wiped out but at what cost - the government is now hiring people to do things that will get them dragged into court? Maybe if everyone (including you, everyone you know and the government) stopped hiring/buying the service then maybe I might receive a little less spam and that is the only way it will really cease being a problem.
I mean 50,000 pieces of spam to nearly 1.2 million AOL users, that's less than .05 penis enlargements per person, pathetic. I've gained greater coverage via semaphore.
Unfortunately another will just take their place. We need technology to stop Spam. Human nature being what it is will continue where ever there is a buck to be made.
You've Got Jail!
Now they've just got to capture that evil meat substitute, and Spam will be eliminated forever!
So did each person get 0.333~ spam then? How exactly does that work...
//wwww.viagra-products .com
AOL subscriber #1: Buy our very high
AOL subscriber #2: quality and cheap
AOL subscriber #2: viagra product! http:
AOL subscriber #4:
AOL subscriber #5:
Damn those evil geniuses!
I guess he wasn't making a ton of money off of spamming, because I live only a few miles from that location.... That isn't a very nice neighborhood. Definitely not something my wife would want to move to.
I thought spammers were supposed to be living the lush life on our nickel.
Doesn't make sense. Sending 50K emails I get. 1.2M subscribers I get, but how can you send 50K emails to 1.2M accounts? 50K to each? 50K split between them? That's like 0.042 emails each.
My God! It's full of Voids!
and also
Since 1984, our investigative responsibilities have expanded to include crimes that involve financial institution fraud, computer and telecommunications fraud, false identification documents, access device fraud, advance fee fraud, electronic funds transfers, and money laundering as it relates to our core violations.
These guys are spammers. If they've advertised p3nis enlargement pills, they've committed fraud and, according to the Secret Service they have jurisdiction over this area. Disclaimer: IANAL
Read for yourself: http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/mission.shtml
ConsultingFair.com
Entrapment means causing someone to do something they would not normally do in order to get them to break the law. This "service" that the spammers were offering was their daily business. It was their regular mode of operation. All the Secret Service did was send an informant in undercover to pose as a customer. Thus there was no entrapment, this is basic policework.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Whats with that math? Did he actually send 50,000 emails to each of 1.2M email addresses? That would be about 60 *billion* email messages. While this wouldn't surprise me for a spammer, that is still a ridiculous amount of mail. I would expect him to get sued by aol afterwards for the extraneous load he placed on their network by doing so.
The other way to read it is he sent 50,000 total emails, distrubuted over 1.2M customers. That would be 1/24th of an email per user. Somehow this seems unlikely to me.
Either way, I'm glad he's busted. Now on to the next 30,000 spammers.
0.333 = 1/3 50000*3 1.5M Maybe each AOL subscriber received 50k spam pieces.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Article is on Spam Daily News, sources listed are: TheSpamDiaries.blogspot.com; Sun Sentinel; ROKSO.
Sounds like total bull to me, Why wasn't this picked up by any real news sources? And since when does the secret service care about spam?
I understand: 50.000 distinct pieces of email destined to a total of 1.5 Million people. Each email message is sent to several persons at the same time.
50.000 distinct emails seems a lot, but I'm assuming that spammers have tools that automatically generate new email messages, slightly different from each other -- to fool spam filters.
So if you send 500,000 E-mails to 1,200,000 poor soules living in AOhell, would that mean that each one got 0.0417 E-mails from these 2 people?
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
I can't believe anyone gets any spam anymore. I actually feel sort of nostalgic for all of the strange offers.
What's next? Secret Service going to bust up a bunch of bolshevics?
Actually they probably should, all of the good spam came from communist countries anyways who were probably just sending it to thumb their nose at our freedom of speech and our weight and erectile problems.
Lousy communists!
How do you send 50,000 spam emails to 1.2 million people? Or were they sending 50,000 mail messages to EACH person?
Informatus Technologicus
our new hero in a jail cell with a bunch of cell mates who have all enlarged their penis, ordered Viagra, and are looking for a new relationship.
I thought the secret service was founded to protect the POTUS.
are you telling me spam is an immediate threat to the POUTS?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
For the sake of the demonstration, I'll pick smaller numbers. Send 2 messages to 5 persons, A, B, C, D, E.
1) Send message #1 to A, B, C.
2) Send message #2 to C, D, E.
It is not said that all 1.5M people received each of the 50k messages.
In spam emails, the From: and To: fields are often erroneous. In that case, the actual recipients are in the Bcc field. So, several people receive a same message that seems addressed to only one.
Other comment:
50k distinct emails to a total of 1.5M people
It is about time that the authorities are starting to take a harder look at those thieves of computer ressources."
So where exactly is the "theft" occurring. I see violation of TOS, and being a general nuisance, but no theft occurred as nothing physical was taken.
Here are his email addresses:
vxgtrey@yahoo.com
gherjso@gmail.com
jtiwekw@hotmail.com
riwqoqop@yahoo.com
cheapmeds@gmail.com
sexysamantha@hotmail.com
etc...
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I want to see Scott Richter in the headline. I've never heard of these other two people. Were they small-time spammers or would-be spammers that were essentially entrapped into the game? They were given more than $6,000 initially to purchase equipment. This suggests to me that perhaps these guys weren't already equiped to do the deed. What if a cop sold a gun to a potential bank robber and then later arrested the same guy for armed robbery?
I have to wonder how shaky the case here might be.
Who cares, its Spam. Death to AO-hell.
I'd prefer to see them go after the businesses that hire them. Paying someone to break the law is also a crime. Cut off their cash flow. It is a lot harder to hide a business with a product and a credit card contract vs a box connected to the net.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Anyone else understand how they sent 50,000 emails to 1,200,000 people?
Each person got 0.0416 emails?
Or did they mean that 50,000 emails were sent to each of the 1,200,000 people? That'd be 60,000,000,000 emails total...
Am I just missing something here or is there some stupidity going on with these numbers.... Artifically making the numbers seem big by including the number of AOL subscribers?
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
The Secret Service was created in 1865 in order to combat counterfeit currency. They expanded to include fraud against the government just a few years later.
The Secret Service didn't have anything to do with protecting the President until 1894, and that wasn't actually official until 1902.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
"All the Secret Service did was send an informant in undercover to pose as a customer."
It sounds like they did more than just posing as customers. Regardless, the moment they made an offer of cash for criminal services, they were entrapping -- inciting crime, creating criminals.
"This 'service' that the spammers were offering was their daily business. It was their regular mode of operation."
If that was a certainty, there would have been enough evidence to convict them already. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but entrapment stinks. You can turn anyone into a criminal if you offer the right price.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Some people will tell you AOL users had it comming to them for flooding Usenet.
Why is the U.S. Secret Service busting spammers? Shouldn't this be the purview of the FTC, FCC or FBI?
God bless.
There were 50,000 completely different spam messages. Each of the 1.2M subscribers possibly got several thousand of those 50,000 pieces of spam.
In spam kings stories like these, AOL always seems to come up as the spammers favourite target.
AOL really needs to get serious about their spam problem.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Does anybody care? The only important thing is there's a spammer in the can. Hopefully the first of many more.
No sig today...
This guy's crime was just sending a billion e-mails? Why, that's hardly illegal at all. There must be something else going on here, like he kicked a senator's dog or something, because nothing's happened to any of the other spammers for whom there is plenty of evidence to put them away - at least, if the government had any real interest in doing so.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Am I the only one that finds the "Compare prices on spam software" link in the "related links" box on the right a wee bit inapropriate? *boggles*
np: Pass Into Silence - Sakura (Pop Ambient 2004)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
If the spammers offered a service, asked for money for it, and the SS then gave it to them, there's no entrapment. In fact, they'd need to complete the transaction to prove something illegal was going on. It's not illegal to talk about selling drugs, or spamming or whatever, it's illegal to actually sell those things. If you've ever watched one of those undercover cop shows, you'll notice they always actually make a buy before arresting a suspect. Otherwise, nothing illegal has happened.
You'll also notice they are careful to let the dealer make the offer. Again another part of making sure it's not entrapment. If they offer it to you, it's obviously something they'd normally do. You didn't entice them, since they came out and offered. So if the spammers offered a service, and then said they'd need a few grand for equipment and such, it's not entrapment. If the SS asked them to spam, they said they weren't setup for it, and the SS said they'd give them what they need, that's entrapment.
Generally, they are very careful about these things.
Hey, now we know where he hangs out. Maybe we can get the poor fellow some extra weight-loss pills, so that he "looses 50 pounds in 5 days" and can slip through the bars. :-)
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
We should go after the spammers but ultimately, people don't spam for fun. They spam for profit.
So why not go after the companies who are advertised in the spam? Make it un-profitable for them to use spammers for advertising by fining them. Do that enough and make the penalties steep enough and they will stop paying the spammers, and the flow of spam will stop.
If a company paid criminals money to spraypaint their advertisments on buildings and on peoples homes and cars then that company would be held as responsible as the person with the paint can (Sony PSP).
It should be the same for spammers and the people that hire them.
I think for every valid piece of evidence in this case, his lawyers should have to wade through at least 200 or 300 viagra/penis enlargment/business offer/sex ads. That would be better than the jail time he would eventually serve.
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means
"Wouldn't it be nice to outlaw stupid people?"
Easy, send them a spam for V1gr@ that contains a virus that prevents them from connecting to the internet again. If they click on the link in the letter then Uncle Darwin solves your problem!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Here's hoping they get some "hard time" in one of our pound-you-in-the-ass prisons!
ACHTUNG! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
You owe me 30 seconds of my life back!
I feel stupider for having read your reply.
Do the math.
Someone mentioned cracking down on ISPs that cater to spammers, but where does free speech end and spam begin? If you start placing arbitrary email limits whos to say what other restrictions would follow? I'm sure there is a practical comprimise but perhaps some spam is a neccessary evil to retain something greater.
I bet they will think about making spammer mugshots public after this one. Hell it wouldn't surprise me if they think the slashdotting they are getting is an attack in response to his arrest. Or maybe their IT guys are choking back laughter as they try to explain to their bosses why the system has slowed to a crawl.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
I wonder why this is illegal at all? So, they are sending legitimate advertisements for legitimate companies, big deal. Yes, it's annoying, but it's not like they are fishing for my CC info or sending viruses.
If this is illegal just for using up computer resources, then regular snail junk mail should be illegal too. It wastes my personal time and resources. I guess junk mail isn't illegal since they are paying off a government entity (USPS) to deliver it to me. Hmm....
"Legitimate mailing-lists, on the other hand, only have addresses of people who have specifically requested to be included in **YOUR** (and YOURS alone - there is no such thing as a "legitimate" purchased list, because the people there HAVE NOT requested to be on it) mailing list."
Even used MSDN-AA? It and many other services want an email address to sign up, and then will start with the box "Send me a buncha stuff in email" checked, which is pretty abhorrent.
Often times if you accidently didn't decheck a box, you're on top of a torrent of crap that can't be stopped because they require you to take addititional (convoluted) steps to get off of it. MS requires you to create an MSN Passport account to turn off emails from its various things, even if signing up requires no such account.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Ya know, the system needs funding. And one spammer less means more market for the rest.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
perhaps 50000 different emails, with different addresses, content, and subject lines etc... to all those poor victims I mean subscribers
As they hemmorage subscribers , I think they are looking to make more money through litigation than through dial-up. In the future, AOL will just be a bank of honeypot accounts used to soak up all of the SPAM and turn that spam into profit!
AOL's New Business Plan
1. Sign up for free iPod
2. Receive Spam
3. Litigate!!!
4. $$$$$
it's that easy
Being a spammer and all, he's probably done a little of all of those.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Wow, that's like 1/24th of an email per customer!
allowing contraband to hit the streets as "part of an investigation"? Yeah, they nail one guy(surely politically unconnected) while ten more slide on by. Like with most illegal activities, I believe they know who's doing what for the most part, but so much money is changing hands, the temptation to let it go and just take a cut is pretty strong. I'm not sure that encouraging illegal behavior is a good way to catch a crook. The article didn't say who solicitated whom. This guy was hired by the gov't. If these 50,000 e-mails are a result of this contract, it looks like entrapment to me.
What?
Man, if child molesters and cop killers have a hard time in prison, who knows what levels of hell a spammer is going to face!
How do you do it? I have never cleaned out my junk mail and I have 16 emails in my junk mail folder and they are all from places I have done business with...
My work email has received two pieces of spam, both from the same IP address and I reported it to the ISP responsible and they stopped it pronto.
Where do you sign up for all of that? I mean I have tried and tried to get spam. When I finally got a letter from Nigeria it made my day. What's your secret!?? Where is the best place to sign up?
"50,000 pieces of spam to 1.2 million people" Is that 50,000 pieces to each person? 50,000 total seems pretty lame.
Ironically, if they delivered working goods as advertised, then it wouldn't be fraud and the Secret Service wouldn't have been involved. The guy's new roommates only received fake pills - his best hope is that they really don't work at all.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
..I'm all for busting people who break the law. I'm also all for more intelligent spam laws. Unfortunately, more intelligent isn't necessarily the same as simply more or strong laws.
Given that the better solution is a secured way of transferring mail (and no, lets not argue the merits of each proposed solution here) still seems to be some ways off from widespread use, we're stuck with the laws.
I ask my fellow geeks here, if we wouldn't be up in arms against nearly any other bust in the realm of what people do with their network connections. P2P music swapping violates laws as well. I don't think those are very good laws right now, but they are in place nonetheless. We do not applaud when someone gets busted in that space, however.
We need to be careful in our responses to be balanced, lest we become as bad as what we hate. We do this all the time with Microsoft and Linux related issues. By default, MS is "bad" and anyone doing something in Linux has a great deal of latitude by comparison.
One part of me says we should throw away the key here -- he's clearly abused the system terribly (assuming the reports are accurate). The other part still resists the use of laws to punish when the system itself encourages the abuse through poor design. We can't trust our mail not because of this creep, but because we do not insist on knowing the identity of who sends us mail. There may be good reasons why we do not, but the this is the consequence of that decision.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
At least that's what MY inbox looks like...
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
Of course, Junior's just been biding his time waiting in fevered anticipation of his daddy's demise...the sins of the son'll probably far outpace the sins of his father...
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
It truly is amazing how many idiots keep asking the same question: "how does it work to get 50,000 emails to 1.2/5m subscribers????111omglOL! 0.04EMAILS !!!!" If you think, MAYBE, they send a single email to MORE THAN ONE PERSON, you could distribute MULTIPLE COPIES of the SAME EMAIL to DIFFERENT PEOPLE. So ACTUALLY, there are probably more than 1.2M or 1.5M INDIVIDUAL EMAILS, but only ~50,000 unique emails. I hope this clears things up and people stop asking this damn question.
The author could have been more clear in his explaination. 50,000 emails are actually 50,000 email campaigns and a lot of people are going to interpret that incorrectly.
Besides 50,000 emails is hardly enough to get you in serious trouble for spam.
This seems like just another excuse for Bush to ride on an aircraft carrier and say "Mission Accomplished"
Remember kids, with great power comes great opportunity to abuse that power
They're gonna be pissed...
Best Slashdot Co
How do you send 50,000 messages to 1.2 million recipients? Or is it 50,000 * 1.2 million messages? What's going on here?
What the fuck? We've been asking law enforcement to actually enforce fraud laws against spammers for some time, and when they finally get around to it, it's by entrapment??
Come on! Why don't they just ask us? We know who the spammers are, and what they are fraudulently and/or illegally selling. Are the authorities looking to legitimize entrapment by making it appear the only way to bring down the spammers who everybody hates? What gives?
Spam is a criminal problem. It must be dealt with by law enforcement.
Bust Alan Ralsky!!
Right on! This is /. We don't tolerate dupes!
So by my rough calculations these 1.2 million AOL users received about 3 words each, or 0.0416 emails. That's unpossible!
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
Totally incorrect. Making an offer (cash or otherwise) for criminal services is not entrapment! Offering money for drugs is not entrapment. Offering money for sex is not entrapment. The rules do not suddenly change in this case.
"Hey buddy -- I'll give you $10 for that bag of weed." Entrapment!? No!
The simple offering of money does not force criminal action, it is not "inciting crime" nor is it "creating criminals." People have free will. An officer of the law can offer you 1 million dollars to shot someone in the head - you know it is illegal - you know you shouldn't do it - you know you can refuse. Just because the money has been offered changes none of those facts.
Here is a text copy of one of the emails, I removed my own email address for privacy:
From :
Sent : February 26, 2006 11:52:48 PM
To:
Subject : Account ID 439177 IMPORTANT: Client's Details Confirmation
Go to previous message | Go to next message | Trash Can | Inbox
MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: from bloc17.suceava.rdsnet.ro ([194.153.243.213]) by bay0-mc8-f9.bay0.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.211); Mon, 27 Feb 2006 08:52:55 -0800
Received: (qmail 4552 by uid 632); Mon, 27 Feb 2006 06:52:48 +0200
X-Message-Info: JGTYoYF78jHr5WWiNnUXMgz/vJOoFSADkfg3/Ey0XGE=
Return-Path:
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 27 Feb 2006 16:52:55.0944 (UTC) FILETIME=[41BE1880:01C63BBE]
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The email origined from bloc17.suceava.rdsnet.ro which is a Romanian domain. I did a domain lookup of www.chase-all.com and got some interesting info:
Registrant:
Steve Rudway marrrk559@ya
This guy likly spammed the president and whitehouse staff.
Ah, so that's what that spaming is that he was charged with!
In God We Trust, Others We Monitor