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."

Comments

Re:Really so bad?

[Ciggy]

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.