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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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
...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.
You sure give up your principles easily