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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.
I noticed a drop in spam over the past week and figured another big arrest had been made, which would be in the news. Well .. an arrest of sorts.
While I don't advocate the killing of spammers, it's hard to argue with results. What I do wonder is if this is a hit from a rival spammer. Where do we see evidence spam was sent to the wrong person? Begin notorious in Russia is a bit unhealthy, particularly when you have large amounts of money and no bodyguards.
From another source:
To do that they'd probably need a supply of pills conventiently and discretely distributed.
BTW, here's the original source of the news
Russian Viagra and Penis Enlargement Spammer MurderedPosted on October 11th, 2007 by admin and filed under Uncategorized.
Wow, just saw this on TV, so I decided to translate this story into English so my readers will be first to learn this. Sorry for mistakes in my English, I'm doing this in a hurry
Alexey Tolstokozhev (btw, in Russian his name means 'Thick Skin'), a Russian spammer, found murdered in his luxury house near Moscow. He has been shot several times with one bullet stuck in his head. According to authorities, this last head shot is a clear mark of russian hit men (known as "killers" in Russia).
Who hated Tolstokozhev so much as to hire a hit man to assasinate him? Well, I guess you have about one billion e-mail users to suspect. Tolstokozhev was a famous spammer who sent millions of e-mail promoting viagra, cialis, penis enlargement pills and other medications. Links in these e-mails usually led to some pharmacy shop, which paid Tolstokozhev a share of its revenue. This is a well known affiliate scheme employed by spammers worldwide.
Tolstokozhev is estimated to be responsible for up to 30% percent of all viagra and penis enlargement related spam.
In order to send millions and millions of unsolicited letters, Tolstokozhev employed a network of infected computers (so-called "botnet"), which he rented from hackers.
How profitable is spam? Well, the authorities say that Tolstokozhev has likely made more than $2 million in 2007 alone. (in comparison: average russian monthly salary is $400)
This is a second murder of a spammer in Russia. Another russian spammer, Vardan Kushnir, was assassinated in 2005.
"Violent murders is a clear sign that spam becomes a serious criminal activity" - the officials say. "Easy money attracts criminals, which bring their own version of "justice" with them."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...against many people. balanced with one huge crime against one person. sort of makes sense?
The article mentions a 2005 murder in Russia, but there were also a couple of spammers in New Jersey who got murdered a few years ago, and the general rumor was that they'd annoyed some New York City Russian mafiosi in a stock scam.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
For what it's worth, this story appears to be fake. The story appears to have originated from this site : http://loonov.com/
If you check the whois info on this site, it was created on October 11, 2007, today. Yet the site shows archives going back to February 2007? Archives which are "disabled' because of high traffic..
Next, if you search for both the name of the spammer, Alexey Tolstokozhev, or the site, loonov.com, you only get links pointing back to loonov.com as the originator of the story.
So it appears that this story is a fraud.
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
Now, the first counter-argument to this is probably "Aw... c'mon... but it's spread out over millions of people so it's no big impact on any one person!". To that, I refer back to the mid 80's. Remember when there were a few years of some clever programmer hacking a bank's computer to transfer 1 penny from a million accounts into his own? Or to move fractions of cents so that the bank statements still rounded to the same numbers? We treated them like they had stolen the net sum a single person, didn't we?
Granted, spam filters catch a lot of the spam. But even if they catch 90%, that leaves us to deal with the remaining 10%... which only means that the guy would have to be in business for 500 days (fewer than two years) to cost a man-life.
Frankly, what *I* am rooting for is for them to capture a spammer, torture him mercilessly and get it all on tape and put it up on YouTube. I doubt that public executions would deter most murders, but I think that seeing and hearing one of their bretheren scream for mercy as each foot is sawn off would give many spammers pause.
And this is why Blue Security's approach was the correct one. It delivered justice in a bloodless way. Now that Blue Security's gone, and that the code is lost, we're back to the drawing board.
:(
If only Google took on the project...
Mark Twain wrote that "There are three kinds of homicide: Felonious, justifiable, and praiseworthy."
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
The "Bell Box" was essentially a computer, designed to accept anonymous wagers, cryptographically signed with an included public key, as to when, where, and how, someone would die.
The point was not really to wager on someone's death. No, the point was that very unpopular people would have such a large pool of small wagers accumulated, that at some point, the risk of getting caught for the murder would be perceived to be less than the payoff for predicting the exact circumstances of the death and seeing to it that they occured.
Combine the Bell Box with the banking secrecy laws in some countries, and, well...
IIRC, the inventor was arrested for having invented it, as a terrorist, but I have no evidence to back that up. No known prototype was ever made.
In Liberty, Rene
Good analysis.
Of course it's also possible that he took an existing amusing checklist and added the references to Russia to it because they're relevant to this particular story. You can work this out by any of the following methods:
a) Comparing the posted version to the original linked above.
b) Noticing that the additions were made in crayon.
c) Getting a sense of humour, or borrowing one from someone who isn't using theirs.
It's also possible that not every attempt at humour is a thinly veiled assault on the former Soviet Union.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Well, see, the old definition of "liberal" (before in the US conservatives managed to redefine it to be some commie-mutant-traitor kinda pejorative) meant... well, the best way to explain it, is what nowadays is called "libertarian". Sorta. Conservatives were for the good ol', tried-and-tested power of the land-owners and top-down way to run an economy (with the king and landowners being "top" and you being "down"), liberals were for a more laissez-faire kind of economy. Let private initiative and the free market take care of everything. That kinda thing.
;)
That was the kind of liberalism that produced (and was produced by) the industrial revolution, which repelled the corn laws, etc.
And it seems to me that this case is as liberal as it gets there. The government wasn't involved, private initiative (of a rich mafioso) led to the optimal solution, and I'm sure that a free market and supply-and-demand economics were involved somehow too. (E.g., he has to pay a competitive wage to the hitmen, based on supply and demand;)
Heck, you can pretty much see Adam Smith's "invisible hand" metaphor in action there. To someone it the death of a spammer was worth more than whatever else he could have bought with that money -- and with the prices and wages in Russia, that must have been a lot of other stuff that could have been bought with the money -- and someone provided a supply for that demand. That's the kind of thing the wealth of nations is built upon.
Caution: some sarcasm may have been involved. I know that's not exactly what Adam Smith was advocating, but hey... An invisible hand beating the snot out of a spammer. Now that's a metaphor I can't resist
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.