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?

[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.

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.

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.

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

[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

[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: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

[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?