Slashdot Mirror
Spammer Alan Ralsky Indicted
Several users have written to tell us that notorious spammer Alan Ralsky has been indicted along with ten others on 41 counts of spam-related illegal activity. Ralsky has had trouble with the law in the past, and the current litany of charges includes mail and wire fraud, money laundering, conspiracy, and violation of federal spamming laws. From the Detroit Free Press:
"The 41-count indictment said Ralsky ... and others used unsolicited e-mail to pump up the price of largely worthless stock in Chinese companies and sold the stock reaping huge profits and leaving Internet subscribers who purchased it holding the bag. The operation also used illegal methods to maximize the amount of spam that could be sent while evading spam-blocking devices and tricked recipients into opening and acting on advertisements, prosecutors said."
I hate spammers as much as anyone, but,
"used unsolicited e-mail to pump up the price of largely worthless stock in Chinese companies and sold the stock reaping huge profits and leaving Internet subscribers who purchased it holding the bag"
almost seems like a public service. If you are stupid enough to buy stock in a company, especially a foreign company, based on unsolicited e-mail you received, you deserve to get screwed.
There are some more links, including to the DoJ docs and some history here.
Thousands of hot inmates are waiting for you!
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
Thank God we caught that bastard! Now we don't have to worry about getting Spam anymore! Luckily for us, catching one spammer makes such a difference that we can all rest easy! It's not like there's a veritable army of Spammers waiting to pick up the slack once he's gone! It's a good thing this is headline news, it's really helping us make a difference!
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
This guy has been a pox on the net for years! Anyone remember that time a long time ago where he was getting so flagrant about it people started signing him up for datalogs, he was getting tons of them in the mail, and had the nerve to get angry about it?
This guy deserves everything he gets. Maybe he'll luck out and his cellmate will have responded to some of those penis pill spams.
(I hate prison rape references as a matter of principle, but here's a guy that I really have a hard time mustering up *too* much sympathy for).
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/001863.html
That's the link for my statistics, just so you know I'm not pulling numbers wildly out of my ass.
Fact is, most people in the US just aren't educated enough to recognize a scam. Look at the earning income and imagine their lives and how desperate one can get. Why do you think those damn AMWAY scams work so well. Promises of a better income for less than well off people.
Notice how I'm not saying stupid people. Just not educated for whatever reason. Most of the people that read slashdot are VERY tech knowledgeable. We grew up with this. Most of the people who get conned, didn't.
Whether they were too poor to afford a home computer and internet access, or were ahead of the technical wave... it doesn't matter. Remember, the internet hasn't been around that long in comparison to everything else. In the past 30 years, we've advanced more than we have in 300 years. Some people simply cannot keep up or get confused and don't try.
It's always easier to be ignorant than try to learn. Look at the statistics in the link I gave you. 27% of the people in the US over the age of 25 have a college degree (This is Bachelors, PHD, Masters, Associates... etc). I bet about 90% of slashdot readers has a college degree of some kind.
So it's suddenly surprising to you that with all this technology and most of the people not growing up with the technology, we have a lot of VERY uneducated people that are easily scammed?
I'm not excusing their behavior, and the fact that they fell for something that was too good to be true, means they fell into two categories
1) Greedy
2) Desperate
Otherwise, you typically don't fall for things like that. Just remember that you are in the top echelon of educated people in the US. What's easy for you to understand and grasp isn't for them. But that doesn't make it okay for trash like this to exploit them. In fact it means that they are the worst kind of trash and low life who KNOWINGLY did it again and again and again.
I have no remorse for any punishment they get. I personally hope they go to prison and meet one of the people whos' lives they ruined financial... who then turned to crime to survive because they didn't know better.
Spam has steadily increased on my server to where it is 98%+ of all mail. Virus mail is about 1% so real legitimate email is now less than one per cent of mail. Real mail is just an impurity in the spam stream.
It's crazy and it keeps increasing month after month. It has cost my company thousands of dollars in equipment, tech support and other manpower costs, lost business, and user bad-will for delayed or filtered mail. When you spread that around to all the other mail systems out there, it is clear that spammers have been doing some real damage.
When someone does catch one, they should go medieval on them. In our enlightened times this means mega-fines and long jail terms in the worst prisons that can be found but honestly I would not be bothered by putting their heads on pikes as an example for what happens when you screw over millions of people.
A conviction where the majority of the sentence came from the spamming law rather than all the other ones (fraud, laundering, etc). The spamming sentence seems to be just the icing on the cake, powerless to have any real effect on its own. It may be adding insult to injury to the criminal, but it's not what nails them in the first place.
The obvious problem with that is that the current system can only deal with people who commit other crimes while spamming, and while a lot certainly do, there are many spammers that don't break these laws and thus get away with the spam itself. Not to mention that proving something like money laundering is MUCH harder for the prosecution than proving spamming.
Y'all Slashdotters complain that the the laws which do and shouldn't (or don't and should) get passed/enforced are because of evil greedy corporations pulling the politicians' strings. Well, here's a question for you. EVERYONE hates spammers (other than spammers themselves). End users like you and me who already got offered to enlarge their penises so often that you could make a space elevator out of one, large corporations whose trademarks get infringed on with fake v14gr4 and bring bad reputation, businesses who lose hundreds of manhours digging through spam in their inboxes, ISPs who's bandwidth gets clogged up (and thus the subscribers of those ISPs as well)... Just about everyone, rich or poor, peon or king, hates spam, and large corporations are as eager as end users to get their governments to do something about it. It's a rare case when nobody is trying to sabotage each other, and everyone has the same goal - stamp out spam.
YET SPAM KEEPS GROWING BIGGER EVERY DAY, AND NOTHING GETS DONE. As I previously described, the current anti-spam laws are a joke when it comes to enforcement, and are only applied to people who get convicted on so many other counts they won't even feel this final punch.
My question is... WHY?
because sometimes bad things happen to bad poeple.
In Soviet Russia, spam kills you
...or so I predict. The maximum fines are but a tiny fraction of his monthly income. The jail terms aren't a threat given overcrowded prisons, the focus on the farcial War on Drugs (TM), the classification of this as a "white-collar" crime, and the technical illiteracy of both juries and judges when it comes to spam. Not to mention that Ralsky is easily smart enough to have planned for this and no doubt has plenty of high-priced legal talent at his disposal -- plus, I wouldn't doubt, a carefully maintained stash of information on other spammers that he can use to plea-bargain his way out of much of this.
All that remains is a book deal and eventual appearances on cable news networks as "a spam expert". Oh, and he might have to "retire" from spamming in the same way that Spamford "retired" -- by moving on to junk faxing, spyware and typosquatting.
I can only conclude you're a bit on the young side if you believe the cure for being suckered is to become highly educated. Live a few more decades and you'll realize highbrows with PhDs are at least as easy to con as the plain folks who fix your car and take your trash away. Probably easier, actually, since the former's intellectual arrogance will blind them to the possibility that they might be fooled.
Of course, the scams intellectuals fall for -- dot-com stock, "flipping" hot Bay Area real estate with subprime mortgage money, socialism, etc. -- tend to be more complex and dazzling then the ol' ATM switcheroo or Nigerian bank fraud. And, since well-spoken intellectuals control the narrative, we tend to laugh at the fools taken in by penis pills while we "smart" people smugly shop for micronutrients, dehydrated horse piss and extracts of Chinese weeds at the organic food store to ward off cancer. Ha ha indeed.
A susceptibility to being conned is part of your character, not a function of your intelligence or education. It's a question of whether you tend to think you know more than you really do, and are willing to make assumptions not backed up by data.
who manages spam fighting systems in the largest organization in Hong Kong. The spam increased by tens of millions every month since August last year, mostly related to this 'stock spamming', you can see how difficult our days were; especially when a couple of them got past our multiple layers of spam controls and reached our top management, who believes no spam should be seen when they paid millions on spam fighting.
I know it's just tip of an iceberg, but this is surely a good news for us.
Ralsky's been documented spamming for a long time. It's about time someone did something about him.
(That link has a pic.)
If the investigation into this guy took three years before they could pull off an arrest, hopefully that means there are more ongoing spammer investigations in the pipelines that will lead to more arrests. We all know there are far to many other spammers out there for this one arrest to make a difference, but if this can lead towards bringing down some of the other big dogs out there, then maybe it will mean something.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
This is almost as sad as AOL going after spammers. Those who have sent out 50 billion unsolicited discs. The companies are infinitely more despicable than any small cabal of spammers. So when will all the unsolicited junk from the large companies be defined as spam and spyware and malware?
Look at it this way, all he did was fascilitate the evolutionary process of punishing stupidity and worsening the circumstances of the unfit.
The world'll be a dumber place without him. You should cry.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
You forget something -- he still sent out spam! Though he got some gullible victims to buy the stock, you still have other victims of the spam and having to deal with the spam and the infected botnets.
Fight Spammers!
From the highest post available to set an example.
I apologize if this sounds harsh. I think they ought to hang 'em high. Throw the book at this guy. Maybe use the same punishment for drug traffickers in South East Asia for this guy. This is the scum of the earth. He do not deserve any clemency. Dig a hole somewhere, a very-very deep one, drop him in all the the way to the molten earth core. Adios, farewell, goodbye!
As an email system administrator, I positively hate this kind of sub-humans. If I am to fall to the dark side of the force, this is it.
Will sys-admin for food
or a suitable likeness of l. ron hubbard.
i'm fairly sure it could be organized without giving up on persecuting spammers. i hold them all in the same esteem for causing fellow 'beans unnecessary frustration: life's short enough as it is.
---- I was woken up this morning by a face full of fur. Damn cat thought my head made a good pillow.
I like the European law much better. Unsolicited commercial advertising by email is forbidden. Only if you can *prove* that I asked to be included in your mailing list, are you allowed to send me advertising. Some companies still try to "sign me up to their newsletter", but I report them all. Several have been fined for such! And rightly so, they use my bandwidth and equipment for their purposes.
I'm sorry but if the business I was in was exceptionally borderline legal and I had been caught and prosecuted before, I would stop doing business in that business, period. He KNEW he faced a chance of having a major conviction but carried on anyway. Only reasons could be greed or stupidity.
To make him look even more stupid, this guy is a multi millionaire. It's not like he couldn't retire and just live a nice life investing his money and living off the interest.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
I had to deal with someone similar. Very talented in finance, could make a fortune if he stayed honest and just used his skills. However, there seems to be some attraction in doing things outside the book, in conning people and committing fraud that appears to be irresistible. I must add that this guy operated in the UK where laws and enforcement appear to be almost DESIGNED for con artists like this guy to work (as an example, you can set up a new company and get VAT paid to you for purchases. If you then close the company the associated assets disappear from tax view - AFAIK he did this multiple times too).
Add to that a legal system that will accept any old sob story in preference to facts and presto, criminal paradise. It's no wonder that people like him and Ralsky think they can get away with it, and mostly they do. It's indeed pure greed and an unwillingness to accept that they could possibly be wrong that gets them caught.
Insert
Remember that it wasn't murdering people or bootlegging that got Capone done, it was Tax evasion.
So the point here is that yes the SPAM penalties should possible be higher but what you really want is the law enforcement people to be so irritated that they find out what else a SPAMmer is doing illegally.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Who do you report them to, and where can I find details on what they can and can't do? There are a few here in the UK that I'd like to stomp on -- UK companies I've bought from (and have been happy with the product) without realising that they'd swamp my inbox with no opt-in or opt-out and that won't remove me even when I email, phone and write. Yes, I've blacklisted them, but I still see them because my blacklist gets lumped in with the heuristic detection, which I have to check occasionally for false positives.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Because I have only received about 10 spam mails in 24 hours, when my usual flow is between 200 and 500 spams a day (filtered, thank ghod)
/. and sure enough. Asshole #1 was caught.
I decided that some SPAM king must have been busted. So I checked
Does that mean that most of my SPAM came from just that one guy?
cat sig >
While there is no guilty verdict yet, I am reading this on a Friday.
I will celebrate this fine event ; with I'm sure the fine folks who have been tracking this guy at SpamHaus.
Let's all drink to this ! I hope the same for all the rest of these idiots --> http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso
Ciao,
Marcello M.
And this is the second unsolicited advertisement you have done for your book in this thread so far. Please stop spamming /. now, and put me on your remove list.
"But this one goes to 11!"
What about an AOL CD coffee coaster and other such things?
I come here for the love
Ralsky or someone like him has spoofed my email address since last August and has used it to send spam around the word. Until the first of January, I got about 200 bounced emails daily. Since these are typically "out of office" or "we think this might be spam" bounces, I estimate maybe 2000 to 4000 were sent out each day using my email address.
Nearly all were for male enlargement pills, but a few were for Christmas gift watches. My ISP did nothing about it, even when I showed them bounced messages with their servers IP addresses. They think somehow that IP address was spoofed also, and claim the spam was not sent from their servers. Their suggestion was I should delete my email address which I did not do because it is used by my clients around the USA. I decided to just wait it out.
This has been a real eye-opener into how spam works. Daily I have gotten bounces from literally every country in the world. The spam message is buried midst some innocent press story. It is usually written in awkward English, but occasionally is fairly well constructed. I am amazed that the messages change several times each day. Somebody is conatantly busy at the rewrite desk.
I am encouraged that a big league spammer is now in legal trouble. Maybe Ralsky was the guy giving me so much grief, since the volume is way down since the first of the year. Only 8 in the last 24 hours. I hope the feds throw the book at him and lock him up for decades.
In the past 30 years, we've advanced more than we have in 300 years.
Electricity, Automobiles, Telephone, Radio, TV, Computers, Flight, Space flight, not to mention countless medical advancements. All of those were advancements made earlier than the past 30 years.
What revolutionary advancements have been made in the past 30 years?
I would argue that we have made very little advancement in the past 30 years versus even the past 60 years. Most of the advancement in the past 30 years has only been incremental.
Offtopic I know, but I just got a chuckle out of your comment about the last 30 years versus the last 300.
I Heart Sorting Networks