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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."
There are some more links, including to the DoJ docs and some history here.
Fraud is one thing. I fully agree with those counts, as far as I agree with the criminal justice system at all. BUT it's completely absurd for it to be illegal to send too much email! His SMTP servers obviously can handle it. The protocols are designed to handle a large volume of traffic. Sending email is exactly what the systems were made for, and the computer's not counting.
Except, you moron, his 'illegal methods to maximize the amount of spam that could be sent while evading spam-blocking devices' involved hijacking other people's computers. 'His SMTP servers' do not exist.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
"200 Known Spam Operations responsible for 80% of your spam."
And I'd say the bulk of it is from a much shorter list. Looking at one hour of spam recorded by Abuse Butler, the most common 100 domains advertised in spam were
39 different domains for Elite Herbal/Express Herbal/Megadik/VPXL (allegedly spammed by Shane Atkinson) -- and this does not take into account multiple different spams for the same domain, a typical pattern with this spam brand
15 domains that were duplicates of the same domains above, but which had shifted to new hijacked servers and were counted as new domains by Abuse Butler
1 Elite Herbal that was already shut down but was still being spammed
16 Canadian Pharmacy (allegedly spammed by Leo Kuvayev)
5 throwaway domains redirecting to a single domain for Canadian Health&Care Mall (attibuted to a spammer who goes by the alias "Alex Polyakov")
3 Las Vegas Casino
2 Penis Enlarge Patch
2 Exquisite Replica
1 Casino Club VIP
1 Diamond Watches
1 Prestige Replicas
1 US Pharmacy
and the remainder miscellaneous non-branded or non-Roman character spam
By shutting down only three spam operations, you could dramatically reduce spam
As far as whether people who fall for these scams deserve what they get, remember that in the US there are truth in advertising laws. Most people who are new to the internet are surprised to find out that blatant scams can be carried out without the government having any easy way to stop them. And spam filtering can make matters worse: It's easier to see that 500 copies of stock spam aren't real stock recommendations from 500 different stock analysts that just happened to land in your inbox by accident on their way to someone else -- but if only one arrives, you might be fooled.
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 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).
So much for principle then. I'm sorry, this is very off topic, but it really disturbs me when people state their principles only to deviate from them a second later. You don't get the bragging right for politically correct principles if you intend to BREAK them. You get them when you stay on your principle no matter what.
This is happening a lot lately with freedom of speech and democracy.
"we "smart" people smugly shop for micronutrients, dehydrated horse piss and extracts of Chinese weeds at the organic food store to ward off cancer."
Speak for yourself mate. Some of us got wise to that nonsense a long time and spend a lot of time trying to disabuse other folks of the notion that there's anything to these mystical, pseudo scientific lies.
(By the way, whilst I don't care for "chinese weeds" to "ward off cancer", organic food has recently been shown in a proper scientific study by the EU to contain more nutrients)
I have to pay for the connection to my ISP. My logged spam comes to a total of:
566,357,862 bytes - from spam sent to my old email address and my replacement email address, plus an additional
104,489,930 bytes - from the email address I abandoned as all it receives is spam, but I keep alive for anywhere that I don't trust and requires an email address; I emptied it last night of 9755 messages (received between 20/07/06 and 08/01/07 [9651] and 104 yesterday after I had emptied it) - I just let it fill and then bounce - and have just checked it now. Over the last 14 hours it has received 445 messages with a total of 1,494,616 bytes
2,344,115 bytes - from 730 spam received this year (over the last 83 hours) at my current email address
So at least 674,686,523 bytes, or 658,873K, or 643M (= 674M as per HD manufacturers) of spam has been received since my email address first got leaked. In consideration that my first PC came with a HD of 525M, the amount of spam I have received would have filled that and more!
I've only recently converted to broadband; prior to that I was on 56K dial-up. So, assuming about 350,000,000 bytes of spam were received during that period, about 62500 seconds or 1041 minutes or 17 hours have been wasted, and I've had to pay for each and every second of that - that amounts to theft of quite a bit of money. Similarly, theft of my current bandwidth would come to quite a pretty penny as well, just a bit smaller.
Before suggesting spam filters, I'd just like to point out a couple of facts:
1) I do have spam filters in place - they divert 99.9999% spam accurately so I never see it in my Inbox
2) They hide the problem, not solve it - spammers will try harder to get through, changing messages and sending more of them.
My spam filters log results: eg last year, spam started off at about 1300 messages/month for Jan and Feb, increased to about 2000/month for most of the year, then about 3000 for Sep and Oct, then 5247 for Nov and 7267 for Dec. Obviously, spam filters were getting better somewhere and so the spammers tried another tact - change the style of the spam and increase it. However, I've also noticed that over the years spam seems to increase vaguely exponentionally, suggesting that my email address started off on one list, then after a while, ended up on another, following a kind of fibonnacci series for the number of lists on which it exists - even my "spam-trap" email address is still being traded and put on more lists by the look of it.
There is also the theft of the Zombie PC owner's ISP connection bandwidth, not to mention the power required to execute the mailing; along with breach of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (in the UK at least).
And as others have mentioned - there's the theft of the time to deal with the incoming spam: the time spent dealing with spam (whether by hacking filters, or manually deleting them) which can never be recovered.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell
Its there if you actually try to find it, instead of just whining about it. The biggest difference between e-mail spam and junk mail is that you can usually opt out of junk mail, but trying to opt out of spam is likely to just get you marked as a "live fish" and put on the "spam faster" list.
For pre-approved credit cards: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/
Other opt-out info: http://clarkhoward.com/advice/toss_telemarketers.html
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
The "little Hitlers" you're talking about are the sysops who wanted the spammers to stop fucking with their email servers. They were 100% absolutely right to say that if you do anything that even remotely hints at acting like spam you should be auto-banned permanently because 99% of people "on the edge" were spammers trying to game the system. Nobody has a divine right to send email, especially if it interferes with REAL customers. The blacklists are the only reason email is still usable.