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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."
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
200 Known Spam Operations responsible for 80% of your spam.
80% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe can be traced via aliases and addresses, redirects, hosting locations of sites and domains, to a hard-core group of around 200 known spam operations ("spam gangs"), almost all of whom are listed in the ROKSO database.
http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso
The US government is pretty much worthless, they frittered for years with little good effect until this day.
Maybe things are improving, somehow.
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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.
"but there are some quality hustlers out there."
There are no smart con-men. Just stupid, greedy, gullible victims.
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I have not read the indictment yet, but it might not be a pure confidence trick.
What we have seen with a lot of recent pump and dump schemes is that the scammers send out some pump spam, then quickly buy some stock themselves, then they then they buy lots more stock from other people's stock broking accounts that they have bought phished credentials for, selling their own stock into the bubble they create.
As I said, I don't know if this is alleged here but it is very hard to prove, they can explain their peculiar purchases by claiming that they acted on the email tip. It is plausible deniability.
So don't blame the prosecutors for only charging what they can prove, there could be more to it.
My book, The dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime was published today. There is a whole host of spam scams described. But at this point spam is pretty much 98% hard core organized crime. The amount of spam from half-way legit companies is a rounding error.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
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.
"Why did the cancer cross the road?
To metastasize."
Since when does taste matter when telling jokes on an anonymous forum, far away from anyone who could be offended (maybe not very far, but how would you know)? Save that formality for the meatspace.
People tend to distance themselves from the subject; it's not like people crowd around some poor soul being raped at knifepoint, nor would many of the people flinging around holocaust jokes bust a gut when shown a video about WW2 concentration camps.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Surprisingly well actually. I list Leo Kuvayev's former company "2K Services" as a credit card processing company (the job I was hired for). When they ask why I left I tell them he changed his business model to something I couldn't participate in and still have a conscience. If they ask for details I tell them everything and I reap the scored sympathy points for having the worst job experience imaginable.
For the record I spent several weeks trying to change his mind then turned down a raise and left the company several months before his new business model forced a national carrier to change their policy on spam and cut his fibre optic connection which was exactly what I warned him they would do when I gave him my contractually required two weeks notice.
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.
Ultimately, theft of trust.
Networks rely on trust and goodwill in order to work. People who subvert the network's resources damage the network by stealing trust. If you haven't already, read this book.
jmp