The Russian Mafia Doesn't Like Spam Either

wattrlz writes "Apparently the current champion of v1*gr4 spamming solicited some of the wrong email boxes. Alexy Tolstokozhev was recently found murdered in his palatial spam-bought estate near Moscow. The implications of this hands on method of system administration are staggering." Update: 10/12 15:28 GMT by Z : Good story. Unfortunately, probably a fake.

Comments

real reason

[cbc1920]

More like the Russian Mafia doesn't like sharing profits.

Re:real reason

[meringuoid]

More like the Russian Mafia doesn't like sharing profits.

The Russian Mafia, like all such organisations, love sharing profits. In fact they love it so much, they'll come round from time to time to your place of business, for a friendly discussion about sharing profits and why it's a great thing to do.

I suspect the late spammer was not the sort of person who liked sharing profits, alas.

And this is good...why?

[BuddyJesus]

I know that nobody likes spammers, but why does that make this murder justified?

Re:And this is good...why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's the killing of a dirty dirty spammer.

Re:And this is good...why?

[couchslug]

If he can waste the time of millions of people with spam, thereby using up little bits of their lives, it is understandable that few will mourn his passing. Good riddance.

Re:And this is good...why?

[BuddyJesus]

Just because he committed despicable acts doesn't justify others doing despicable acts as well. He should have been punished through the legal system, not through a criminal organization.

Re:And this is good...why?

[Nefarious Wheel]

Just because he committed despicable acts doesn't justify others doing despicable acts as well. He should have been punished through the legal system, not through a criminal organization

I agree, but "should" doesn't have the force of law everywhere.

They used to hang horse thieves, I hear -- interruption of someone's only means of communication. And that was for just one horse. Property is defended by force, whether or not that force is legal, because people will react emotively, not always rationally, to things that affect them directly.

So -- is an attack on your bandwidth, your personal inbox, annoying? Say that it is, for a few million people. What percentage of those people are not merely annoyed, but enraged? And of those, who with the will and the means will carry out a vengeful act?

The point is if you annoy enough people, you can expect common justice, rough or smooth.

Re:And this is good...why?

[BuddyJesus]

No, it's not justice. Justice is being given what you're due. He wasn't due death, he was due prison time and a huge fine. I'm not saying we should mourn him, but applauding the Russian Mafia for what they did isn't the right thing either.

Good.

[Solder Fumes]

I know someone is going to get on their high horse and say that spam is annoying but not a cause for murder.

Maybe I should feel the same way.

However, I'm only slightly surprised to find that my conscience doesn't have any problem at all allowing me to feel happy at the news of this man's death.

Re:Good.

[arkhan_jg]

I'd never advocate killing a spammer. But I too, am finding it hard to be sad he's dead. as a sysadmin, I spend anything up to a days-worth of my time a week dealing with the fallout from spam. The users that complain about legitimate email that's flagged as possibly spam, even though it IS really spam from someone they know. The users that complain about spam that isn't caught by the filters, a much larger group. The overseas user from hong kong who I've just spent a month working with, working with 3 different ISPs to try and track down his particular oddball problem negotiating our anti-spam defences. Hotmail, blocking my entirely legitimate leased line ISP's mail server for 3 days because some luser reported someone else's legit mailing list as spam. Again.

I think about the millions of hours wasted every year in my country by mail admins on dealing with this crap, the huge amount of money spent on unnecessary bandwidth and mail server capacity, the unimaginable amount of time spent trying to block owned pcs, or clean them of their spam-spewing infections.

Yes, he was no eponymous third world dictator torturing and murdering his citizens. And yet, given the millions of lives he's stolen so much time from, the massive waste of billions of pounds to support his millions in profit extracted from a handful of idiots. I'm not sorry he's dead.

The implications are staggering?

[Tim C]

The implication is that if you piss off the wrong people, you could end up dead. Quite how that's surprising (let alone staggering) I don't know.

Big mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Mafia does not kill for spam - they kill for not sharing the profits of the venture. The guy probably thought that just because his business is virtual it is immune from racket, big mistake but I won't shred a single tear for this bastard. Maybe a hitfund should be setup - $1 mln per head of top 20 spammers in the world.

Cause for a Bullet

[_Sprocket_]

Unfortunately the bullet in the head probably wasn't earned because he was a scum-sucking Internet bottom feeder but because he was a scum-sucking Internet bottom feeder who didn't pay up.

Eh, one more to the pile of dead

[Shihar]

It doesn't justify the murder, but hell, people die every day. Thousands of people will die in the time it takes to read this post. Of those thousands of people that are moments away from dying, I would say it is a safe bet that at least a few of them are truly wonderful and good people and that the world will be a worse place for their leaving it... and chances are you won't give two shits about a single one of them.

Now, some ass hole spammer is dead. Is it sad? Eh, it is sad in the way that anyone dying is sad, and well, people dying is not that sad. We manage to make it through each day cheerfully despite the massive amounts of death going on the world. So one guy who has made a name for himself by being a complete asshole is dead. It is hard to drum up any sort of negative feelings when plenty of completely good humans dropped dead within hours of his doing so and most people didn't shed a tear for them either.

Re:Not the first time

[Cassius Corodes]

I think its possible that the mafia is expanding into spam business - or that they were demanding a cut of the action and where rebuked.

Re:What is the deal with spam?

[erikvcl]

You sir, are an idiot. Can I take it that you like getting paper junk mail too? What's your address? I have a load of crap to send to your house. What's your e-mail address? Let me send you some e-mails. Are you on the do-not-call list? I would guess you aren't: what's your phone number?

I go to the USPS website and look up any address in the US. Does that mean I should send random people loads of crap they don't want? According to you, that's the fault of the USPS since the mail isn't traceable -- just like e-mail. E-mail was modeled after post: both are more or less untraceable. Just because e-mails are untraceable doesn't give others the right to abuse that.

Unsolicited paper mail, phone calls, or e-mail are all in the same category. They are rude, disrespectful annoyances. If you want to get that crap fine; in your case, the advertisements, spam, and phone calls at dinner time would be solicited.

To live in a free and peaceful society, people have to respect the privacy and rights of others. We should not purposefully annoy our neighbors or cause them harm. These are basic rules of social conduct.

I hope that I never have to be your neighbor. Your reckless disregard for the well-being, time, and privacy of others is shocking.

Direct correlation

[halcyon1234]

While I have no qualms with a spammer/scammer getting offed in a most satisfactory way, I would hesitate to celebrate it as a victory for "anti-spam". If he was murdered by the Russian mafia, it wasn't because Don Boris got one too many Viagara advertisements. It's because, as a rich business owner, he didn't pay protection money. Or because he short-changed a pill supplier, who is probably a mafia person too-- and mispaying the mafia directly or indirectly isn't good. Or he moved in on someone else's territory. Or because he had boatloads of cash hanging around and didn't buy an ADT alarm system.

Basically, he wasn't murdered because of spam. He was murdered because he was a anuscluster who crossed the wrong people.

Though, I do think it would be wonderful if Don Boris' 18 year old nephew, who is also the "company's" sys-admin, came to him one day and said "Hey, you know what I want for my graduation present? {type type typitty type whois reverselookup tap-type-print} That snogmuffin off the Internet."

Re:Not the first time

[vlad30]

I really would recommend that anyone who gets pissed off when they receive spam read the link the below. It cured me as I actually felt sorry for him by then end:

Scientology, Spam, ripped of employees
No I don't feel sorry for him

Re:Not the first time

[thegrassyknowl]

> I actually felt sorry for him by then end:

You don't get much spam do you? I administer a business network. We can't use draconian spam filtering to just drop it all at the MTA because one false positive and I'm out of the job. SPAM is a huge pain in my ass on a daily basis. I don't advocate vigilante justice but it seems in this case it's only fair. Spammers get fat and rich by being lazy and incompetent. They get others to make their botnets, they use software that's written for them. They only have to type ONE email at practically zero cost to receive a million hits.

Now, let's see more spammers taken down this way. It might be an incentive for them to stop.

Re:Not the first time

[despisethesun]

The rational part of my brain says "yeah spamming is bad, but the punishment should fit the crime." On a greater level, this sort of behaviour should be discouraged as the dangers of vigilantism outweigh any benefits. Slippery slope and all that. That said, it's really tough to be sympathetic to the victims in these cases. If you piss off enough people, odds are good that one of them will come after you. My feelings are less "that poor man!" and more "probably not the best way to solve the problem".

Re:That explains it - vigilante justice

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't advocate the killing of spammers, it's hard to argue with results.

Actually it is easy to argue with the results. This is not justice, but a crime. We must be wary about attitudes which condone vigilante justice. When justice escapes from the hands of the state, and becomes a matter of criminal organizations or private individuals to administer, to the cheers of the mob, society will become dangerous not only for those who find themselves target of this sort of justice, but also those who cheer.

anon

Re:FAKE NEWS?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

The argument that it's fake doesn't look all that convincing to me. Basically, it's saying "this story sounds like another murder two years ago that turned out to have nothing to do with spam" -- so what? Most organized crime murders, regardless of the motive, look pretty similar. And there are a lot of organized crime murders in Russia.

Re:That explains it - vigilante justice

[Pooua]

"Actually it is easy to argue with the results. This is not justice, but a crime. We must be wary about attitudes which condone vigilante justice. When justice escapes from the hands of the state, and becomes a matter of criminal organizations or private individuals to administer, to the cheers of the mob, society will become dangerous not only for those who find themselves target of this sort of justice, but also those who cheer."

That's true. That is why government must be effective at protecting the public. Otherwise, as the Founders of the U.S. noted, it is the right of the people to change their government.

Vigilantism is a horrible, frightening thing, and you have to ask yourself if you want to live in that kind of world. But, there comes a point, when someone has been abused enough, that vigilantism is the lesser of the evils.

We must have a way to tell people to stop that will make them stop.

Re:Not the first time

[Lost Race]

My impression is that spammers occasionally get killed for the same reason they occasionally go to jail: not because they spam but because they're low-life criminals involved in lots of shady underworld activities.

Re:Not the first time

[totally bogus dude]

in the course of one year that one spammer has wasted 285 person-years of other people's lives

Okay...

A truly just punishment would be to torture him continuously

So wasting a bit of time deleting unwanted email is somehow equivalent to... torture? How do you figure that? How is that "just"? If you really think deleting spam from your inbox is somehow equivalent to being tortured continuously for "as far beyond a normal human life span as possible" then you must live a highly charmed life, indeed. Either that or your email client really, really sucks.

Re:Not the first time

[Anonymous Coward]

But being a nuisance on a massive scale is still just being a nuisance. He hasn't seriously hurt anyone. It's not something that ought to be allowed to happen, but you can't seriously argue that he ought to be tortured for it.

A just punishment would be to seize his assets and garnish whatever honest salary he is capable of earning and attempt to use them to undo the economic damage he did. You could use the money to fund small business loans or something. Doing anything with the money is better than allowing someone who sells fraudulent products by wasting lots of people's time to have it.

Re:Death Penalty

[Mr. Slippery]

I imagine that here in the US, the death penalty would be more of a deterrent if the same held true. If no one was ever on death row for more than two weeks and when the execution happened it was on the front page with a picture of the body.

Not so much.

In England around 1800, picking pockets was a capital crime. (As were more than 200 other offenses.) Yet, pickpockets routinely worked the crowds at public hangings.

Time was - back in the 1600s - in Russia, you could be summarily executed for possession of tobacco. Didn't stop people from smoking.

Executions, public or not, are not a significant deterrant.

Re:Not the first time

[sjames]

Things like this are the natural result of civil authority failing to reflect the public's values. Most people want spammers stopped and very few ever even hear from law enforcement. Vigilantism always comes along to fill the gap.

I'm not at all sympathetic towards the dead dirty spammer. I sincerely hope they desicrated his corpse and put it on display as a warning to others. My only fear is that sooner or later an innocent will be killed in a case of mistaken identity. Due process and a fair trial are important.

As for the punishment fitting the crime, it's a tough judgement. Spammers willfully waste the time of millions of people daily and drive up costs for everyone. They are slowly rendering email useless. They have forced truly massive expendatures worldwide to upgrade mail servers just so they can keep up with their crap. I have to wonder how many children have received penis pill and sex toy spams?

beyond that, they pay other criminals to exploit millions of PCs to continue their harassment of the entire online world.

I don't know how many misdemeanors it should take to equal a capital offense but these guys are racking up a million a day.

Re:Not the first time

[fractoid]

Sure! How would we do that? Simple. Convicted spammers are compelled to work for 12 hours a day in a Mechanical Turk configuration, as sentient spam filters. Their results are cross-referenced, and for every false positive or false negative they get a taser zap to the 'nads just to keep them honest. They have to spam check 1 email for every spam email they send.

At a rate of 1 email per second they could get through around 40k emails per day. You'd definitely think twice about spamming if your example 330 million emails equated to 20 years hard slog.

Re:Not the first time

[fractoid]

I would imagine the sheer volume of "best pr1ce c1ali5" would overwhelm them and probably burn any such details out of their minds in short order - remember they have to read each email very rapidly, can't pause the stream, and would have no facility to record such things. It's a good point though - some filtering may be possible, or you could just assume that the spammer would be humanely disposed of at the end of their sentence.

Maybe you're a sick bastard that needs help

[MacDork]

In total, in the course of one year that one spammer has wasted 285 person-years of other people's lives. If someone kills him, he's gotten off lucky compared to a punishment that would truly fit the crime.

So the next time I get stuck in a traffic jam for hours with thousands of other people because some poor bastard in a beat up el Camino knocked off on the freeway, I'm free to shoot him? I don't think it works that way. I think you're just a sick fuck. No, really, you need help. People like you end up doing crazy shit like bombing olympic events and such. If unsolicited email advertising bothers you that much, you are in serious need of psychological evaluation and some kind of anxiety medication. You should see a shrink. Soon.

But first, why don't you go read the 8th Amendment of the US Constitution while I quote a few words out of your own hypocritical mouth:

The point of even having a Constitution, laws, etc., is that we are supposed to abide by them. If we can ignore them whenever they happen to be inconvenient to our immediate needs (even the ill-defined "National Security"), then they are worthless.

Re:Maybe you're a sick bastard that needs help

[Eric Smith]

So the next time I get stuck in a traffic jam for hours with thousands of other people because some poor bastard in a beat up el Camino knocked off on the freeway, I'm free to shoot him? Huh? The "poor bastard" presumably wasn't trying to waste anyone's time, and in any case probably only wasted a few hundred or maybe a few thousand person-hours. That's orders of magnitude away from the damages deliberately inflicted on us by spammers.

why don't you go read the 8th Amendment of the US Constitution I'm well aware of the Eighth Amendment. It's not clear to me that letting the punishment fit the crime is "cruel and unusual". The case law is mixed.

quote a few words out of your own hypocritical mouth Get a grip. I suppose you thought Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" was serious?

I was pointing out the logical conclusion arising from someone else's suggestion that the punishment should fit the crime. I'm not claiming that our current laws would actually allow such a result, nor am I inciting anyone to apply "vigilante justice" (though that's apparently already happening).

Re:Not the first time

[Jake Dodgie]

What about those people who are paying him to do it, should they not take some responsibility for the service they are paying for?

Re:Not the first time

[emilng]

Actually a just punishment for a spammer would be to have them manually delete a number of emails equal to the number of spams they have sent out. They would have to sort through a certain number of inboxes in a day. If they accidentally delete a relevant message from an inbox they would have to start over with that inbox. It would mean life imprisonment spent deleting spam messages, but the punishment would at least fit the crime.

Re:Not the first time

[Eric Smith]

So wasting a bit of time deleting unwanted email is somehow equivalent to... torture? How do you figure that? Suppose the spammer made YOU PERSONALLY spend 385 person-years deleting his messages (i.e., around four times your natural lifetime, doing NOTHING ELSE). Would you still feel that the spammer didn't deserve torture?

So why do you think it is less bad for the spammer to waste 385 person-years distributed amongst many people?

right

[someone1234]

Lets say, deleting one days of spam is equivalent of a needle prick.
Now, do the math, add them up for all the people on the world receiving the spam.

He must've been really dumb

[gevantry]

I suspect that the truly successful spammers are smart enough to hide their identities. Even in a country where laws concerning this abuse of the internet are lax or non-existent, one should be smart enough to know that their anti-social behavior is going to attract unwanted and hateful attention.

Spammers don't deserve death. They deserve a punishment that will strip them of their property and most of their money, put them in jail for running botnets (theft of someone else's online connection fees), and forever bar them from using PCs under pain of further prosecution, and subject them surveillance to make sure they stay compliant with the terms of their convictions.

Loss of wealth and property is torture enough.

Re:Not the first time

[slimey_limey]

borderline spam also generates an address unknown bounceback to the sender.

Oh, no, that's not good at all. That's positively evil. My school email address is short, so I get a crapload of spam bounces. At least they're mostly trivial to filter on.

Re:Not the first time

[totally bogus dude]

Suppose the spammer

Suppose I raped you with a banana. Would I deserve to be tortured for that? Quite probably, depending on your moral code. But I haven't done so, so what the fuck has that got to do with anything?

made YOU PERSONALLY spend 385 person-years deleting his messages. [...] Would you still feel that the spammer didn't deserve torture?

Possibly not, but you've completely changed the scenario. If he was MAKING me do that for my whole life, then he'd have to be physically and violently enforcing it, because it's not something I would choose to do without some very strong persuasion. But then, he'd be doing a lot worse than merely using a botnet to send a whole bunch of emails, making it a completely different situation. Thus, my flippant rebuttal above.

So why do you think it is less bad for the spammer to waste 385 person-years distributed amongst many people?

Partly because for each of those people it's a much smaller burden than that, and partly because nobody is MAKING anybody do anything. If the burden of deleting a couple of spam a day is too much for you, then find some software to help manage it, or stop using email. I don't like wasting my time watching ads on TV either; just think of the person-decades (centuries?) that have been wasted by advertising! Should everyone that pays for ads to be put on TV and radio be subject to torture for the rest of their lives, too?

Overwhelmingly though, the reason is because I'm not a psychopath. While I might be persuaded that society would be overwhelmingly better off if a particular individual was put to death, torturing someone for as long as possible -- even working very hard to keep them alive so they can be tortured for longer -- is completely fucking sadistic. What kind of human actually wants to inflict such things on another, especially for something so trivial as wasting a bit of their time? Or even a lot of it?

Plenty of people waste my time. Marketers calling up to try to sell their product. Users who ask me to show them how to do something for the 100th time because they're too fucking thick (or lazy) to remember how. Hell, you're wasting my time right now! By the far the biggest waster of my time though is me. It's just not that big a deal. Certainly I'd prefer not to receive spam, and not to have to spend time devising methods to make my computers not receive spam on my behalf, but it's not enough to turn me into a psychopath.

In closing, I would just like to say -- and this is coming from a guy who's posting in an utterly pointless thread on /. on a Friday afternoon while the rest of his co-workers have either left or are at the sundowner doing whatever it is normal social people like doing, and who's great plan for the weekend is to play IL-2 -- if you really think that the inconvenience of "having" to delete a bunch of unwanted email every day is somehow comparable to the horror and inhumanity of subjecting someone to torture for their entire life (and some of their unnatural life), then you REALLY need to get a fucking life. Either that, or you need some kind of counselling.

Sure spam sucks, but it's a pretty insignificant price to pay for the convenience and luxury of having something like email in the first place. I definitely advocating measures to catch the spammers; seizing their assets and ensuring they can't spam again (monitoring, imprisonment maybe) is a smashing idea. But torturing them is pretty sick.

Re:Not the first time

[Sique]

So if I drive a large truck (40 tons), I torture everyone nearby a little with the noise the engine makes. During my livetime I'll drive about 1,5 mio miles, and at each mile I disturb maybe 1200 people shortly (three seconds) with my noise. According to your argumentation I should then be forced to endure 1,5 mio hrs of traffic noise as a punishment? And because after retirement I won't live another 1,5 mio hrs (a year only has 8760 or 8784 hrs), we just increase the intensity of the noise? About one year with 200 trucks around me?

Re:Not the first time

[Dark_Gravity]

...They are slowly rendering email useless...

I don't know how many misdemeanors it should take to equal a capital offense but these guys are racking up a million a day.

Great points. I offer two corrections.

1. Email is not being slowly rendered useless. It happened quickly and quite some time ago.

2. The computer crimes spammers commit are all felonies not misdemeanors.

Hoax, and Possible Malware Vector

[The Angry Mick]

The Register is saying this looking more and more like a hoax.

Alexey Tolstokozhev fails to show up on any web searches either, except in the context of his supposed assassination. Informed parties, such as Sunbelt president and chief executive Alex Eckelberry, have never heard of him either.

Eckelberry did a little digging and discovered that Loonov's website, where reports of the hit first surfaced, was only registered on Tuesday and with EST Domains, an operation that has attracted complaints about hosting malware.

Loonov's website is free of malware (at least at the time of writing) but distinctly whiffy. Bloggers who first took the story at face value have begun to reverse their positions.