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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
to "Spam Assassin"!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
More like the Russian Mafia doesn't like sharing profits.
Looks like there are more ways than just v1agr@ for you to end up a stiff.
I know that nobody likes spammers, but why does that make this murder justified?
Derive Politics
...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
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.
Mafia conventiently and discretely deliver YOU!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
Can someone make sure this guy is next?
--- We need more Ron Paul!
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.
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.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it, anywhere other than Russia
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, asshole! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
(X) THANK YOU! ONE DOWN. MANY MORE TO GO.
Get off my lawn.
Does Tolstokozhev's killer get the SysAdmin Of The Year award?
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
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.
For what it's worth, this story appears to be fake.
If so, I would not be surprised if it inspired the real thing at some point in the near future.
Any bets?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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."
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Original story is on
http://loonov.com/russian-viagra-and-penis-enlargement-spammer-murdered.htm#
Domain Name: LOONOV.COM
Registrar: ESTDOMAINS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.estdomains.com
Referral URL: http://www.estdomains.com/
Name Server: NS0.HQHOST.NET
Name Server: NS1.HQHOST.NET
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 11-oct-2007
Creation Date: 11-oct-2007
Expiration Date: 11-oct-2008
Fake hoax information link
http://taint.org/2007/10/11/203243a.html
Domain loonov.com registered Oct 11th... FAKE!!!!
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
Please post an update saying this story appears to be a fake.
Looks faked.
How sad.
Well, we changed the scores on a few spamassassin rules on our mailserver yesterday. I guess the changes were far more effective than we had anticipated.
according to this it seems that the story is fake
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
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.
In Soviet Russia, humour assaults you!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"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.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
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.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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:
Googled the guy's name in Russian - no spam- or even internet-related mentions.
Because in Soviet Russia, ...
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
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.
I find it funny that all of us are so into this story and no one has bothered to verify it. The guy claims he heard the news on TV and decided to translate it for us. The thing is that if you speak Russian, and check out the TV channels, or the Russian news agencies - none of them mentions such a case. For instance, http://lenta.ru/internet/ is silent about it.
I must say this was a job well done by this bogus artist, he managed to spawn a classic slashdot dispute with many insightful posts, bravo! Well, maybe this will make spammers feel a bit uncomfortable...
Morale of the story: 10 thousand lemmings can be wrong.
The saddest poem
register is reporting this as a hoax. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/12/russian_spammer_murder/ tsk tsk tsk
i know not what weapons the next world war will be fought with, but world war IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
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.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.