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

That explains it

[ackthpt]

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:

It won't be surprising to hear of an Organizatsiya connection, should the authorities probe the murder deeply.

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 Murdered

Posted 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."

Re:That explains it

[PhxBlue]

Well .. an arrest of sorts.

My money's on cardiac. *Rimshot!*

Re:That explains it

[modecx]

Personally, I doubt that he got assassinated because someone hated him. He probably got whacked because he refused to pay the mob for his cut for illicit activities on their turf--and being an asshole was simply icing on the cake.

Re:That explains it

[markov_chain]

Where do we see evidence spam was sent to the wrong person?

Dude, it's pretty clear-- imagine telling Tony Soprano his dick is small! You would be lucky to get off with a quick shooting.

Re:That explains it

[ackthpt]

Well .. an arrest of sorts. My money's on cardiac. *Rimshot!*

For spammers this may become known as Death by Natural Causes.

"That's odd I feel strangely different, there's a dead body in here and blood everywhere."
"YOU HAVE MAIL."
"Who are you? Do I know you, have we met?"
"I USUALLY MEET EVERYONE ONLY ONCE."
"Uh. Ooooohh...."

Re:That explains it

[fatphil]

I've long advocated the death by a million paper cuts.

What's one spam? Perhaps a slight annoyance, but nothing more.
What's one paper cut? Perhaps a slight annoyance, but nothing more.

Right, multiply both by many many million...

Gives a whole new meaning...

[thewiz]

to "Spam Assassin"!

Re:Gives a whole new meaning...

[LParks]

He had been missing for a while, and luckily investigators decided to do a DNA test on some unidentifiable canned mystery meat found in his home. The Russian mafia likes irony as much as brutality.

Re:Gives a whole new meaning...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, spam assasinate YOU!

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.

Oops

[bcguitar33]

Looks like there are more ways than just v1agr@ for you to end up a stiff.

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?

[pluther]

Mark Twain wrote that "There are three kinds of homicide: Felonious, justifiable, and praiseworthy."

Not the first time

[billstewart]

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.

Re:Not the first time

[Ash Vince]

The last russian spammer who was killed specialised in Russian language spam advertising his own "American Language Center". The idea was that they taught you American (ie - English) and then you used that to get your own job (yup, no placement or visa included).

Apparently this guy sent out tons of spam inside Russia and managed to annoy too many people with the sheer volume, making a small fortune in the process.

Then he was found beaten to death. According to the Wired article I remember reading some time ago (link posted below) the people who killed him really took their time to make sure he suffered. No bullets are mentioned, although a lot of blood and a very sound kicking is. Then the police just swept the whole thing under the carpet.

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:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/spamking.html

Re:Not the first time

[MightyMartian]

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.

That would be my take as well. This just rings of organized crime "moving in". You saw the same thing in the olden days when the rum runners were "consolidated" by guys like Al Calpone.

The message here is clear to all Russian online scammers; give us a cut or they'll be picking pieces of you off the floor.

Re:Not the first time

[jollyreaper]

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: How long did the sympathy take to wear off?

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:Not the first time

[Eric Smith]

The rational part of my brain says "yeah spamming is bad, but the punishment should fit the crime."

Sure! How would we do that?

Suppose a spammer sends 300 million spams in a campaign, and 10% reach people's inboxes. The average recipient takes 3 seconds to look at the subject line and delete the spam. The spammer runs 100 such campaigns a year. 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.

A truly just punishment would be to torture him continuously, while using every known medical means to keep him alive indefinitely (as far beyond a normal human life span as possible). And even that wouldn't really do it, because it would probably just drive him (more) insane and catatonic in a few weeks or months.

Perhaps the appropriate form of torture would be the spam equivalent of the Ludovico Technique, but carried out for as long as the spammer can be kept alive.

Re:Not the first time

[Pooua]

"So it's the death penalty for sending out unwanted e-mail now? I thought Larry Niven's idea of society accepting capital punishment for minor crimes was laughable, but maybe he wasn't so far off the mark."

If someone were to bump into me as I walked along the sidewalk, it would be annoying, but ignorable. If he did it every day, I would become irritated, maybe even complain about him to authorities for assault and battery. But, if he did it several times a day, and the governments of the world failed to stop him from doing it, there would come a time when I would probably try to kill him.

Believe me, the thought of buying an international plane ticket and a weapon has crossed my mind many times.

Re:Not the first time

[ozmanjusri]

and who says geeks are mostly liberal.

We are.

Some of us just take Spam Assassin a little too literally.

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

[guacamole]

That murder had nothing to do with the victims spam activities:

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7845&IBLOCK_ID=35

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

[jaxtherat]

Dude, have you ever TRIED to use outlook??

Re:Not the first time

[Basehart]

Oh, and then you set fire to them when they're done.

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

[cp.tar]

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.

Well, of course.

They'd be so brain-dead by the end of their sentence that they could safely be disposed of in, say, the government.

Re:Not the first time

[abb3w]

This just rings of organized crime "moving in". You saw the same thing in the olden days when the rum runners were "consolidated" by guys like Al Calpone.

Probably just in eastern Europe. The American Mafia may be involved in prostitution, illegal waste disposal, drug running, bookmaking, extortion, and (of course) money laundering, but they are still a Family business with some standards.

Re:Not the first time

[arth1]

From what I've read about this in non-English news sources, his spam operation was part of russian mafia operations, and he was likely killed for unauthorized "side business".

As for his "luxury palace", I'm not sure a one bedroom (two-room) apartment in a run-down district of Moscow qualifies. Granted, rent is probably as high in Moscow as in other capitals, but...

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.

Re:What is the deal with spam?

[brxndxn]

Can someone make sure this guy is next?

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.

Let's haul out the checklist!

[clintp]

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.

Big Prize?

[jetpack]

Does Tolstokozhev's killer get the SysAdmin Of The Year award?

Fake Story?

[XenoPhage]

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.

Re:Fake Story?

[Javi0084]

McAfee thinks so too http://www.avertlabs.com/research/blog/index.php/2007/10/11/two-dead-spammers/

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.

Spammer assasination story a fake!

[wolfeon]

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!!!!

CmdrTaco, are you there?

[Spy der Mann]

Please post an update saying this story appears to be a fake.

FAKE NEWS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks faked.

How sad.

Re:Let's haul out the checklist! Q&A

[couchslug]

In Soviet Russia, humour assaults you!

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.