Spammer Alan Ralsky Pleads Guilty

Czmyt sends the excellent news that one of the US's most notorious spammers has pleaded guilty and could serve 6 years in jail. "Five individuals pleaded guilty today in federal court in Detroit for their roles in a wide-ranging international stock fraud scheme involving the illegal use of bulk commercial e-mails, or 'spamming'... Alan M. Ralsky, 64, of West Bloomfield, Mich., and Scott K. Bradley, 38, also of West Bloomfield, both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and to violate the CAN-SPAM Act. ... Ralsky and Bradley also pleaded guilty to wire fraud, money laundering, and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Ralsky acknowledges he is facing up to 87 months in prison and a $1 million fine..."

Comments

Judgement

[cthulu_mt]

Hang him from the nearest lamp post and then burn him.

Re:Judgement

[pbhj]

Hang him from the nearest lamp post and then burn him.

Yeah, we should only allow company executives and rich investors to take vast amounts of money through share price manipulation.

Re:Judgement

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, at least those execs and investors didn't clog up my inbox with V|agr@ ads

Re:Judgement

[Legion303]

We do have more lamp posts.

Re:Judgement

[wannabgeek]

A little perspective please...

Yes, spam is damn annoying and the guys deserve imprisonment, and confiscation of every penny they earned through spam. But to compare fraudulent execs favorably to these, is a little overboard. Cheating you out of your money is lesser crime than spam?!?!

Re:Judgement

[arndawg]

Hey, at least those execs and investors didn't clog up my inbox with V|agr@ ads

1999 called. They want their spamfilter back.

Re:Judgement

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah, we should only allow company executives and rich investors to take vast amounts of money through share price manipulation.

Not to worry. If there are three things we have in abundance, it's rope, lamp posts and gasoline.

Re:Judgement

[JesterUSCG]

Dirty SOB... Let him rot!

Re:Judgement

[hansraj]

Clearly they are calling the wrong guy - it is obvious that he doesn't have 1999's or anyone's spam-filter.

Re:Judgement

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheating me out of my *time* and the usefulness of email *every* *dang* *day*? It's a close call....

I was going to post the sentiment until I saw the other AC above had beaten me to it.

Re:Judgement

[Gandalf_Greyhame]

Not to worry. If there are three things we have in abundance, it's rope, lamp posts and gasoline.

Rope and lamp posts, yes. We are slowly running out of petroleum though

Re:Judgement

[emocomputerjock]

I say we go green and focus a concave mirror on the guy. We get our pound of (burnt) flesh and the planet doesn't suffer for it!

Re:Judgement

[dkleinsc]

This also allows us to come up with a new method of judging these guys: If Alan Ralsky weighs the same as a duck, then he floats in water, so he's made of wood, so he burns, so he's ... a spammer!

Re:Judgement

[hairyfeet]

Well, to be fair, the execs cheat some of us some of the time, while the spammers cheat all of us all of the time. How? Bandwidth and time, neither of which is free. Just think how much faster ALL of our Internet connections would be if the servers of the world wasn't constantly getting pounded with spam, and if you think you waste time cleaning out spam, imagine what the guys running the mail servers have to go through every...damned...day.

But I'm willing to be an optimist and say we just kill BOTH the execs AND the spammers! What? It isn't like thinning the herd wouldn't be a bad idea, and it isn't like we don't have enough bullets to take care of them both, right? ;-)

Re:Judgement

[Z00L00K]

Only $1million?

Clean him from everything he owns and assign an orange tight jump-suit, then locate him at a maximum security prison somewhere unknown and forget about him. Just make sure that he ends up in the "wrong" cell block.

Re:Judgement

[jank1887]

The spam industry has imposed escalating usage costs on every mail server out there (bandwidth, storage, filtering, etc.). I'm sure someone did a guestimate study on total cost of spam that quantifies this, and while it isn't bringing down the banking system, it is something when taken in aggregate. Is stealing $1 from 1,000,000 people better than if someone steals $1,000,000 from one person? It's the same loss of economic capital (to those who should have it, at least), plus broken-window-esque inefficiencies that can drag down the economy.

Re:Judgement

[Opportunist]

Don't worry, I have a ready supply for pitchforks you can borrow.

Hey, I've been watching our government's doing for a while, I thought it could come handy soon.

Re:Judgement

[Anonymous Coward]

It's curious how bandwidth and storage space are costly when talking about something reviled like spam (which is generally just text), yet bandwidth and storage space are absolutely free (or nearly so) when talking about online music or movie publishing.

Re:Judgement

[Darkness404]

Heres a bit of perspective, movies and music can be easily published with P2P, that requires very very very little bandwidth on the server because everyone uploads from their own connections. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer for more information. But spam is sent almost purely via e-mail which comes from a centralized server and is not P2P plus they are sent in massive amounts, enough to use up a chunk of bandwidth, even more so when they embed images and such in there.

Re:Judgement

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry. I thought most spam was distributed via botnets, which in effect act as many P2P systems. Again, you're presenting a double-standard when it's convenient to do so.

Re:Judgement

[Imagix]

But spam is sent almost purely via e-mail which comes from a centralized server and is not P2P plus they are sent in massive amounts, enough to use up a chunk of bandwidth, even more so when they embed images and such in there.

That probably hasn't been done in a long time. Spam frequently originates from a botnet, not from a centralized server. However, from your perspective it does come _to_ a centralized server. To a certain degree, spam is a DDoS attack.

Re:Judgement

[lazyforker]

A little perspective please...

Yes, spam is damn annoying and the guys deserve imprisonment, and confiscation of every penny they earned through spam. But to compare fraudulent execs favorably to these, is a little overboard. Cheating you out of your money is lesser crime than spam?!?!

I think it's a tough call between the two: both cause enormous waste. You probably don't realize just how much email is spam because companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft do a pretty damn good job of filtering it out of their webmail products. Similarly your employer probably has spam filters etc. All of that junk email costs time, money and power; and those resources could probably be more effectively used elsewhere.

Some good stats are in this informative article: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/01/2008-year-in-spam.html

The average number of spam emails a user would have received per day: 194.

Re:Judgement

[David Gerard]

You realise of course this is the one guy who would get beaten to death in a white-collar Club Fed.

Re:Judgement

[jcaplan]

I get as livid as anyone about spam, but the whole prison rape thing really bugs me. Its real and is allowed to occur by our prison system, but is not part of the sentence. Nobody, not even spammers, deserve rape. What I don't get is why it took so long to take down this known spammer.

Re:Judgement

[cthulu_mt]

Please send shipment to Albany New York as soon as possible!

Re:Judgement

[Digital End]

and instead they get a year and a million fine... you think spam on that scale made less then a million a year?

Re:Judgement

[Darkness404]

Yes, my mistake I was getting the two confused what I really meant to say is that spam goes to a centralized server (although it does come from a centralized server from the user's point of view).

Re:Judgement

[Anonymous Coward]

For one thing only the government is cheating me out of money. All the stock scammers did not get a dime out of me why? I'm not stupid enough to invest in "The Market". The Market is a gamble and anyone that invested in it and lost well too bad. You should have taken you money to Las Vegas and "Invested" it there. You might have done better and you would not have been able to cry to the government about your losses at the crap table.

Hang this bastard yes. I am able to make a choice about investing in the market and if I do that is "My Choice". Getting spam and having to put up with this shit being a Postmaster was not a choice I made but an invasion of my private life and still is.

Think man over 90% of all email today is shit because of people like this and billions are lost by companies trying to keep this shit off their networks.

Re:Judgement

[Gandalf_Greyhame]

Even if it is all distributed via botnets, it is still all sent to mail servers, which are then sent on to your email program, either as headers, or full blown emails. So whether you want to download it or not, you will be getting a part of the download.

Compare this to a typical P2P transfer, where you download it if you want it, not merely because you went online. The only way that you would be able to liken spam to P2P would be if you open up a P2P program and it automatically downloads 15 second chunks of every file that is available. Now that would be, I believe, a fair comparison of the difference between spam and P2P storage space/bandwidth.

That is only from the end user's perspective. Now, if we liken it to a mail servers perspective it would be more like this: You open up a P2P program, and every file is sent in full to your computer to be stored. You do not want these files, you do not need these files. Now you must spend hours of your time going through all of the files to determine which ones you do want, and which ones you don't. Now, this is a waste of both storage space, since you need to have sufficient storage space to get all of the junk just so that you are able to get the new Ubuntu build, and bandwidth, as 99.9324%* of the files that were downloaded were unwanted garbage.

I know, I know... I shouldn't feed the trolls

*This figure is completely fictional, and was pulled out of my arse. Any pedants who wish to contest this figure as being an inaccurate representation of the amount of spam on the average spam server can go and get stuffed

Re:Judgement

[Dishevel]

Isn't Ralsky just an Exec of a SPAM company?

Re:Judgement

[Anonymous Coward]

That works fine at home, where I can get the spam filter working.

At work on the other hand... I basically just read the 'spam' folder and ignore anything that goes in the inbox. None of the real mail goes there.

Re:Judgement

[Anonymous Coward]

Should be hung drawn and quartered then feed him to the rats!!

Spammers and hackers nearly brought my business to its knees several times.

Bring back capital punishment!!

Re:Judgement

[Ash-Fox]

It's curious how bandwidth and storage space are costly when talking about something reviled like spam (which is generally just text), yet bandwidth and storage space are absolutely free (or nearly so) when talking about online music or movie publishing.

There is at least one month a year when my mail server gets DDoSed offline from the insane amount of spam coming through. It would cost me too much to get a better setup. Additionally I'd say about 40% of spam the mail server receives has image attachments embedded in the message.

Re:Judgement

[bertoelcon]

This also allows us to come up with a new method of judging these guys: If Alan Ralsky weighs the same as a duck, then he floats in water, so he's made of wood, so he burns, so he's ... a spammer!

Perfect witch hunt logic, but its not a witch hunt if its true is it?

Re:Judgement

[andymadigan]

Movie/Music "distribution" uses your bandwidth and time by your own choice. On the other hand, spam takes up your bandwidth and time whether you like it or not. The only way to avoid it is to not have e-mail, which causes you to lose a lot more than just spam.

Re:Judgement

[Iphtashu Fitz]

True, it may be sent via botnets, but it's received by centralized servers. I work at a university that receives on average 1.1 million e-mails a day. Over 2/3 of that is spam. We have a massive infrastructure of spam filtering systems and storage networks just to handle our regular level of e-mail for our thousands of users. The additional cost and manpower to prevent spam from getting through is tremendous. Just the bandwidth alone for receiving 600,000 spams a day (approx. 10 gigabytes) is pretty high. We also have to deal with the regularly occuring student laptop that gets infected with malware and starts sending out spam from the university. Tracking those sorts of things down can be very time consuming. So the bottom line is that spam is a very real and significant cost in terms of storage, bandwidth, and manpower for large organizations like companies, universities, etc.

You want to start paying for the 10 gig of daily bandwidth costs that are directly attributed to spam for us?

Re:Judgement

[BCW2]

Theft is theft, Period.
Anyone who tries to differentiate is a co-conspirator.

Re:Judgement

[someone1234]

These scum already take up the majority of bandwidth of the tubes.
They are one reason why ISP's need to buy bigger servers and couldn't lower their prices.
So, these scum directly cheat me out of my money, yeah.
My time is also money.
Losing a mail in the heap of spam can also cost you money.
While i don't say they should be burnt or hung, i would like their fingers broken and banned from the net for a life.

Re:Judgement

[ChaosAddict]

In case we need another lamp post, here you go:

Lamp.

Re:Judgement

[ChaosAddict]

In case we need another lamp post, here you go:

Lamp.

Re:Judgement

[sjames]

In the interest of sustainable living I would suggest feeding them into a tree chipper instead. Use the remains as fish food.

Besides, that would make great footage for a FUD campaign to get people to install working antivirus software. "Don't let this happen to you, keep your machine clean.".

Re:Judgement

[mirkob]

as 99.9324%* of the files that were downloaded were unwanted garbage.

*This figure is completely fictional, and was pulled out of my arse.

not so fictional unfortunately!

in the mail server that I administer there are about 80/90.000 connection to send mail every day, of those only about 2.000 weren't blocked by the greylist.
of those 2000 at least 10% were blocked on the first mail server as spam or virus and then at least another 10% is blocked on the final server for the same causes.

so no more than 1600 mail/day were legittimate (or at least not filtered out, because many spam still pass) and that comprise the locally generated mail (the ones that doesn't have spam or virus except for the occasional epidemic...)

so at least 78400/80000 = 98% were spam (or virus), excluding the locally generated mail at least 99% of the mail coming in from internet is certainly unwanted!

I want be surprised if only 0.5% or less were truly legitimate working mail and not unusefull mailing list never cancelled...

Re:Judgement

[Anonymous Coward]

It bothers me too, but I guess some folks only the guys who deserve it get rape. Or even that only guys who deserve it go to prison anyway.

Whatever.

Personally I feel that indifference to the wrongness of it is just a shame in itself. If you're going to say you want somebody punished by being forcibly raped, make it a part of the justice system. Don't be a coward and leave it to the inmates.

And for what it's worth, I wouldn't mind this spammer being flayed alive on national television with a warning that says "Spammers this will happen to you"

Re:Judgement

[sjames]

Let's see, spammers provide financial incentive to operate botnets that do billions in damage. My mail server rejects over 99% of all incoming mail as spam. The remaining fraction of a percent is about 25% spam. Fail2ban triggers on about 1000 hosts attempting to brute force an SMTP password every single day. If I tail the logs, it's a continuous stream of crap 24/7. I could do without that.

It is a close call. I suppose we just need to make BOTH into permanent porta-potty scrubbers.

Re:Judgement

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheating you out of your money is lesser crime than spam?!?!

No, but there are plenty of lampposts to go around.

Re:Judgement

[Anonymous Coward]

I've recently had to abandon an email account (which forwarded to my old ISP email account (BT), which was picked up by gmail on yet another email account) because I was getting spam in Russian, and neither yahoo nor google's spam filters stopped any of it, despite me marking it all as spam in both.

Using translate on it (replacing dashes and underscores which were tripping it up with spaces) revealed that it was typical spam, just in Russian.

Re:Judgement

[EmmDashNine]

Hang him from the nearest lamp post and then burn him.

There's a special place in hell for people like that- on an IT help desk answering unlimited calls and emails, and resetting passwords for all eternity.

Re:Judgement

[SkyDude]

Not only the costs, but the loss of trust. Email users (that's pretty much all of us), especially the non-tech types, have been told over and over to not respond to email. Some understand the instruction, many do not, but there are many who now think any email they don't like or want is spam.

I operate a web site for an author who sells his own books. We keep in touch with his internet customer base via email, using Constant Contact, a very good and ethical bulk email service. Inevitably, after we've sent an email campaign, I see several who have marked the email as spam. They didn't just unsubscribe, they went the extra steps to report our email as spam, which it isn't because they opted-in. One fellow even sent an email to the author accusing him of sending spam. Ironically, the guy has a web based business and on his web site guess what he has - an email sign-up field!

For small businesses, email should be a godsend - no paper is used, no postage is purchased and the cost is small. Thanks to turds like Ralsky, emailing one's customers has become problematic and is close to being a waste of time. People have been so pounded by all the crap, legitimate communications are categorized with the sh*t he and his ilk have produced.

I don't think capital punishment is appropriate, but six years isn't enough. More like 25 in a Supermax would be about right.

Re:Judgement

[Ant P.]

I propose we use corrupt execs as an alternative fuel source. Once we run out of them we can move on to RIAA lawyers.

Re:Judgement

[FireFury03]

there are many who now think any email they don't like or want is spam.

I'm afraid I've pretty much lost track of which of the following categories email I don't like falls into:
  * Totally unsolicited untargeted mail
  * Totally unsolicited targeted mail
  * Marketing junk from a company who legitimately has my email address but was explicitly asked not to send me marketing junk by ticking a "don't send me junk" box.
  * Marketing junk from a company who legitimately has my email address but was implicitly asked not to send me marketing junk by not ticking a "send me junk" box.
  * Other random junk that someone I have done business with feels would be in my interest to read but really isn't.
  * Stuff I actually signed up for once upon a time.

And rarely do the unsubscribe links actually work on the last 4 types of junk too, so even if things once were legitimate or honest mistakes, they end up no better than the true spam.

They didn't just unsubscribe, they went the extra steps to report our email as spam, which it isn't because they opted-in.

See above - most of the time the unsubscribe links just plain don't work on the legitimate stuff, you definitely don't want to click an unsubscribe link on non-legit stuff and I get so much crap in my inbox I honestly can't remember whether I voluntarily signed up for it 5 years ago anyway.

Re:Judgement

[Anonymous Coward]

And spammers rapes our mailboxes every day!

Re:Judgement

[geekoid]

What? you mean you can't use email at all? I think not.

Oh, at that person who slowed downa little too much? lets burn them alive to becasue they 'wasted' your time as well.

Jack ass.

Re:Judgement

[geekoid]

I know a guy who whines all day about spam and uses completly unreasonable punishments for 'these people' as he says.
He makes 100K+ getting to prevent SPAM from getting through corporate servers.

Seriously, if SPAM stopped he would literally be out of work.
SO I like to remind him those scum suckers keep him employed, in a nice house, and private school for his kids.
Without SPAM, he would be a 40K a year admin.

He hates it when I tell him that.

Re:Judgement

[X0563511]

Fortunatly, 90% of my spam is obvious.

In order of occurrence:
1. Is in a non-latin character set (I speak/read English only)
2. Has worse grammar then a 4th grader with learning disabilities
3. IM 'invite' spam
4. "Nigerian" scams

1 is obviously not a problem - I couldn't read it if I wanted to. 2 is fairly obvious - there are few people I communicate with that are like that, and even fewer that I would do business with. 3 - I don't chat, so this is both obvious and pointless. 4 - No, I will not help you collect your funds, piss off.

So, in my case I get very little spam that makes me think before I send it to the filters. I think I get one spam-like thing, and I deliberately went out of my way to get it, and it's one that's hard to forget.

Re:Judgement

[ps2os2]

True, but they stole money from everyone (almost) and now lot of people are not going to be in a risky home situation where they may not have enough money to feed themselves which means we will have to support them with our tax money. Plus the government is going to get involved and that means 80 cents (or more) of every dollar we give them will go to the to the people who administer the program.

Re:Judgement

[dugeen]

Quite so sir. In my estimation the evident enthusiasm for rape displayed by some Slashdotters leaves them in no moral position to criticise spammers.

Re:Judgement

[punissuer]

Who said anything about burning people alive? On the other hand, it seems that whenever a spammer gets arrested, I get less spam, so I think Ralsky's guilty plea is good news.

An old Nigerian Tradition

[ultraexactzz]

...involved leaving 10% of him here, sending 50% to the Prince of Nigeria, and sending 40% to the corrupt Nigerian government officials as a bribe. It has worked well for generations - But we'll need your help to complete the transaction...

Re:An old Nigerian Tradition

[Sockatume]

Sounds like a fair punishment to me.

Nice.

[SalaSSin]

Nice to read that finally one of those guys will be convict'ed.

Hopefully the rest will follow, but i'm afraid that won't be as simple, as in several countries sending spam still isn't illegal...

Math

[MyLongNickName]

Ralsky acknowledges he is facing up to 87 months in prison and a $1 million fine..

Summary says 6 years, then 87 months. Someone want to RTFA and tell me where the difference comes in?

Re:Math

[Andr T.]

Alan M. Ralsky, 64, of West Bloomfield, Mich., and Scott K. Bradley, 38, also of West Bloomfield, both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and to violate the CAN-SPAM Act. Ralsky and Bradley also pleaded guilty to wire fraud, money laundering, and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Ralsky acknowledges he is facing up to 87 months in prison and a $1 million fine under the federal sentencing guidelines while Bradley acknowledges that he is facing up to 78 months in prison and a $1 million fine under the federal sentencing guidelines.

John S. Bown, 45, of Fresno, Calif., pleaded guilty ... facing up to 63 months in prison and a $75,000 fine under the federal sentencing guidelines

William C. Neil, 46, of Fresno, pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the CAN-SPAM Act and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Neil acknowledges he is facing up to 37 months in prison...

James E. Fite, 36, of Culver City, Calif., ... up to two years in prison and a $30,000 fine under the federal sentencing guidelines.

Re:Math

[MyLongNickName]

Thanks for the in depth analysis...

Re:Math

[jonbryce]

I've not read the article, but maybe 87 months is the maximum penalty, and 6 years is what he is likely to get?

Re:Math

[Andr T.]

I still don't see why they say '6 years' if they could say 7. Maybe lawyers really have a problem with math.

Re:Math

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they meant 313 weeks.

Plan of action

[Mr_Icon]

Once he's in jail, we need to find out who his cellmate is, so we can send him inordinate amounts of penis enlargement ads.

Re:Plan of action

[Opportunist]

And all the V1@gr4 and C!5al1s he can swallow!

Re:Plan of action

[jollyreaper]

Once he's in jail, we need to find out who his cellmate is, so we can send him inordinate amounts of penis enlargement ads.

Or you could donate a dollar to his enlargement fund.

Re:Plan of action

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think prisoners in the U.S. get laptops and WLAN access. It's not Austria!

Re:Plan of action

[houghi]

I always had my doubts if these things worked, but with your posting I understand that the pills do work, so now I am going to order them.

Re:Plan of action

[Ash-Fox]

I don't think prisoners in the U.S. get laptops and WLAN access. It's not Austria!

What you linked is not a jail, it is a rehabilitation centre. Check out the rehabilitation centres in the USA, some of them are quite comparable.

Re:Plan of action

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think prisoners in the U.S. get laptops and WLAN access. It's not Austria!

What you linked is not a jail, it is a rehabilitation centre. Check out the rehabilitation centres in the USA, some of them are quite comparable.

It's not a rehabilitation centre. It's a prison. Here's their website.

They offer computer and german classes. Makes me regret going to Goethe Institut!

Re:Plan of action

[DeskLazer]

I believe the proper term is his "endowment" fund.

Re:Plan of action

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could donate a dollar to his enlargement fund.

I would like to donate to his prison time enlargement fund

Re:Plan of action

[Ash-Fox]

It's not a rehabilitation centre. It's a prison. Here's their website.

You do realize there are rehabilitation centres for criminals, right?

Sorry Dude

[sir_eccles]

"Greetings friend, this is Homer Simpson, aka, Happy Dude. The courts have ordered me to call everyone, and apologize for my telemarketing scam...I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send $1 to Sorry Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power!"

because nothing is funnier than anal rape

[Anonymous Coward]

yay slashdot, putting the rape in anal since 1997.

Question to a lawyer out there...

[fgaliegue]

I suppose that if Mr Ralsky has pleaded guilty, he had a good reason... To my non-lawyer eyes, it is because he would have faced a much bigger sanction if he were proved guilty in the end.

Does my reasoning stand, or not at all? In a more general way, are there any quantitative differences in penalties depending upon yours pleading (non) guilty?

Re:Question to a lawyer out there...

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFS. "Under the terms of his plea agreement..."

Re:Question to a lawyer out there...

[fgaliegue]

I _have_ RTFS. Which is exactly why I asked the question in the first place. RTFQ.

Forget the prison sentence.

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

Let's just simplify it all at no expense to the taxpayers.

Anyone who ever got an unsolicited email from Ralsky gets one shot at him. One for each email. No weapons, no tools, nothing lethal, and no closed fists. Then he goes free.

And then after a few million slaps to the nuts, we all jump up and go "HAHA! Don't you just HATE being misled!" and throw him in prison, take all his money, and give his cellmate (who has anger issues due to being conned in stock scams) a box containing his body weight in Viagra.

THEN we hang him from the nearest lamp post and burn him.

Re:Forget the prison sentence.

[gTsiros]

you're right, we should just kill him.

Re:Forget the prison sentence.

[Plugh]

Actually, English Common Law is not too different from this. The idea behind "having justice done" was restitution, ie, the idea that the perpetrator has to "restore" the injured person to his "whole" state.

Today, it's the government that brings the charges, and then the injured party gets victimized twice -- once by the criminal, and once again by the government who taxes him to pay for the incarceration of the criminal.

Government justice works just as well as government-made cars, government-run post office, and any other monopoly you can think of.

Re:Forget the prison sentence.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget the prison sentence. (Score:4, Informative)

Mods....??? Wake Up!!!

Re:Forget the prison sentence.

[Anonymous Coward]

He never said he wanted him crippled, he said he wanted to see him punched in the nuts a few million times, then hung and burned. I don't see why Al shouldn't be able to walk after that.

And you know what, fuck him if it happens. We're not talking about someone who's contributed to society here. We're talking about someone who has spent the past decade willingly and gleefully wasting and destroying other people's resources for the sole purpose of committing fraud on an epic scale. Fuck him. Fuck him right up the ass. I don't even believe in the death penalty, but if someone were to take a bat to Ralsky's skull I'd be the first one in line to shit on his grave. He's guilty, we all know it, he knows that we all know it, and still he continues to destroy the time, effort, and energy of people that he knows damned well want nothing to do with him or his "services." If there's any truth to karma at all, he's going to get jammed into a wood chipper by some guy with a monstrous Viagra boner who lost all his money on pump-and-dump stock.

Re:Forget the prison sentence.

[Eggplant62]

So, wanna get in on a BRAND NEW BUSINESS as a FEDERAL PRISON PROVIDER COMPANY? It's a great ground level opportunity to build your prison from the ground up! Get all the local, state and federal subsidies you could ever squander! Hire your own team of crack prison guards!

WARNING: Waterboarding may be illegal in some jurisdictions. Your mileage may vary. Check with your local law enforcement agencies. Nah, don't bother, they won't answer, they won't have to, they're LAW ENFORCEMENT.

Summary fix

[swb]

"...Ralsky acknowledges he is facing up to 87 months in A FEDERAL, POUND-ME-IN-THE-ASS prison..."

There, fixed it.

Re:Summary fix

[Macrat]

Will there be water boarding?

Re:Summary fix

[Korey Kaczor]

Only poorly-run state prisons have that, um, "feature," I believe. And Mac OS X shops.

Re:Summary fix

[legirons]

Will there be water boarding?

no, he wasn't arrested in London, England

$1 million fine

[smdm]

Finally we make real money from SPAM!

Re:$1 million fine

[Solandri]

Did they confiscate his earnings too? He supposedly made $3 million by spamming. If he's just being fined $1 million and gets to keep the other $2 million, I'd hardly call this effective even with the prison sentence.

Nice

[kenp2002]

So is he's going to a nice minimum security prision for 6 years on the tax payer dime and getting fined a million eh? How much do you want to bet he'll earn more then a million in 6 years in interest on the money he's taken in.

Sentence should have been 6 years and all assets seized.

Re:Nice

[Opportunist]

How about a RIAA-style punishment? No time, but an amount of USD that we imagine he could have made in that time with all the spam?

What good does it serve if he gets locked away? He costs my money that way. Fine him for a few trillion bucks and lock some nice shackles to his ankles so you have a useful handle to shake him at.

Re:Nice

[kenp2002]

Yes I would agree. Perhaps a solution would be:

Take the ill-gotten gains and deposit them in a bank. 50% of the interest earned goes towards restitution and the other 50% to cover the costs of parole and house arrest.

Life moves on.

Re:Nice

[geekoid]

Naw, sentence should ahve been to seize all assets and a month in jail.

Seriously, I don't want to pay to feed this guy, put him on parole and make him a ex-con.
Life will be hard, and it's cheaper for us.

Re:Nice

[kenp2002]

Without turning this into a 50 post thread on the concept of criminal justice I'l summarize thusly:

"Take everything away from a criminal and leave him nothing but the title of criminal; then all you will every have is a criminal."

We learned this in WW1\WW2 as we decimated Germany's ability to function as a nation after WW1 which was the root cause for the Nazi rise to power. We learned that when you put a man in jail then release him into the public with no future, no second chances, no resources, all you did was help train him to be a better criminal.

One must be careful not to make life "too hard" for a criminal so they have a chance to make something of their life once they do their time.

Spammers don't care how much you hate them

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people STILL buy their products

Re:Spammers don't care how much you hate them

[Sobrique]

One in a million shots don't seem as bad when you've got 6 billion bullets.

Man...

[azav]

I'm so so so happy about this.

A suitable punishment

[wowbagger]

There are many here who say "It's just a little spam - have some perspective."

OK, so how about this perspective:

Let's just slap his wrist.

Once for every spam reported to Spamcop.net.

Just for one day.

After all, it's just a slap on the wrist - that's not so bad, is it?

Re:A suitable punishment

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many here who say "It's just a little spam - have some perspective."

OK, so how about this perspective:

Let's just slap his wrist.

Once for every spam reported to Spamcop.net.

Just for one day.

After all, it's just a slap on the wrist - that's not so bad, is it?

I don't think we could fit that in one day.

Re:A suitable punishment

[dargaud]

Let's just slap his wrist. Once for every [...]

That was the ending of Les Onze Mille Verges, a classic porn book of over a century ago.

Re:A suitable punishment

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of who say so probably have never seen what happens with a modest domain without spam filtering...
That they don't see spam doesn't mean it wastes resources daily, everywhere.

Re:A suitable punishment

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I wear gloves covered with broken glass while I slap him?

Re:A suitable punishment

[Artifakt]

That's the point for all the people who are complaining about the Hang 'Em, then Burn 'Em posts. The guy did something wrong. Maybe fair punishment for that something is literally a slap on the wrist, or a 1 dollar fine, or something equally trivial. But if you literally slap a person's wrist often enough to finish punishing them for fifty million counts before they die of old age, about a million slaps into it their arm will look like a side of beef and they will go into shock and die. Even a few hundred thousand slaps will end up making that wrist look like its been slowly fed into a wood chipper. Try to devise a punishment that really counts as a punishment at all, yet fifty or a hundred million counts of it won't brutally kill a person. Hit him with a softly falling drop of water for each spam, and if you give them time to drain away it's the old Chinese water torture, and if you don't he drowns full fathom five.
    Then there's time - If he serves 1 second per victim per spam, that's a dozen consecutive life sentences or more.
    There's your perspective - If we make the punishment no more out of perspective than break even, an old fashioned eye for an eye, there's no way we can actually do it, one even exchange, one tiny penalty per one act of spam, at a time. We have to aggregate clusters of offenses, a few thousand spams here, a few thousands there, and then keep the penalties for those small, so that the accumulated total for clusters of clusters would still be humanly possible for him to serve.

Pleaded?

[destroyer661]

Shouldn't it be they plead as plural?

Re:Pleaded?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe pled would be proper tense here.

Re:Pleaded?

[Vegeta99]

Gramatically? Yes. Colloquially? No. At least not where I'm at in Pennsylvania. When you're talking about how someone first responded to an indictment, it's pleaded. Every other use? Plead.

Spam revitalises local economies!

[David Gerard]

Email filtering company MessageLabs reports that Egham, Surrey, on the suburban outskirts of London, is the town that receives the most spam in Britain.

"It's not like there's much else to do," said Boris Busybody, 77 (IQ), of Egham Hythe, idly whirling his four-foot penis around his head in a desultory fashion. "Expanding your manhood, growing your breasts, increasing your sperm ... the Lib Dem phone calls get a bit much. That's Doctor Busybody, by the way. My Ph.D arrived last week."

Spam has revitalised the local economy. Busybody has given up cab driving and is now working a lucrative job processing payments from home after he sent them his bank details in response to an urgent security message. "I had that King Otumfuo Opoku Ware II in the back of my cab once. Very generous and helpful fellow."

The Egham Tourist Board has seized the day, with plans for a 50 foot tall penis sculpture at Junction 13 of the M25 on the exit ramp to the town. The sculpture will be encircled by a genuine imitation Rolex and spray a fountain of Spermamax, obtained at a very reasonable rate from a Canadian pharmacy. "You will search an hour for your underwear in the ocean of our spam!" is to become the new town motto.

"I did get a good one the other day," says Busybody. "Barrister Matthew Sergeant Busybody of MessageLabs said we could promote our town to millions of people just by sending them an advance fee to process our incoming email. The stuff they try! 'Scuse me, V!k@grk@ kicking in, got to go have sex again. Sorry."

Well,

[TheMightyFuzzball]

That is less money that you will have to pay for downloading 25 songs, at least.

Mod parent up!

[petrus4]

I wish I had mod points. Very creative, very funny!!

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize he just copied it from the link he provided?

Re:Mod parent up!

[Ant P.]

That's the wonderful thing about computers! Thanks to copy and paste he doesn't have to write the entire thing twice.

Can I sue now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do I have the right to sue him for the time and money I've had to dedicate to stopping his now admitted spamming operation?

A bit of a bummer

[hoarier]

Is anal rape really all that hilarious? Me, I'd have him sentenced to 87 months of sorting dumpster content. But his ass would remain his own.

Re:A bit of a bummer

[sqldr]

Is anal rape really all that hilarious?

It is when I do it in my clown suit.

I don't get it

[tsa]

I don't get it anymore. Someone shares 24 songs online and she gets a 1.92 M$ fine, and this guy, who annoyed a whole lot of people and got money for that too, only gets a 1 M$ fine? So if you do something for others you are fined more than when you annoy people because you get money for it? Unbelievable. What happened to the Land of the Free?

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

It got bought out by corporations.

This Guy Was My Neighbor

[Tempest_2084]

This guy was my neighbor when I was growing up. It doesn't surprise me that he grew up to be a spam king, he was always looking for a way to 'get rich quick' and had a more than average understanding of computers (and a less than average understanding of just about everything else). I can remember him running some sort of telecommunications software on his Apple II every time I was over at his house playing with his daughter. Now looking back on it, I wonder what he was doing and if it was legal. Then again he gave me hundreds of pirated Apple II games at the time so probably not (although I was one happy 10 year old).

Re:This Guy Was My Neighbor

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's not right, but I'd vote to kill these guys if it were an option.

Yes yes, punishment doesn't fit the crime but I *hate* them.

Re:This Guy Was My Neighbor

[Anonymous Coward]

> every time I was over at his house playing with his daughter. Now looking back on it, I wonder what he was doing and if it was legal.

Careful with stuff like that. Nowadays with all the hysteria around people might also wonder what you were doing with his daughter and if it was legal ;).

Re:This Guy Was My Neighbor

[Tempest_2084]

Careful with stuff like that. Nowadays with all the hysteria around people might also wonder what you were doing with his daughter and if it was legal ;).

IIRC playing board games and hoping that her dad would let me play Karateka when he was done doing whatever he was doing. Like I said, I was 10. :)

He annoyed individuals, she annoyed a corporation

[Kupfernigk]

Quite simple really when you know how. Remind me again what they call a State where corporations and the Government work in close collaboration, Signors Mussolini and Berlusconi?

6 yrs long time

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone here actually been to jail? I have and 6 years is a Long F kng time.

It could be worse

[incripshin]

He got off easy. Just think of how much money he would owe if he had been downloading music. And I'm sure he got paid well with his spam business.

You forgot to include...

[macraig]

... some torture involving his testicles. Of course since he's 64 maybe they atrophied and he doesn't have any? OTOH, he musta had some balls to pull this kinda crap....

Why do they allow it to be profitable?

[grapeape]

Maybe I'm just a simpleton but shouldn't fines exceed the amount of money a person profits in a scam? Ralsky supposedly made over $4 million in less than 18 months. Not that I'm surprised the same thing happens with corrupt CEO's and their ilk. The idea that someone looses a fraction of their ill gotten gains, spends a couple years in jail then gets to live out the rest of their life in relative comfort with the rest of the fortune they managed to gain through their illegal activities does nothing but make the idea seem relatively attractive to those willing to give away a couple of years of their life in exchange for riches.

Nahhh

[davidwr]

Let him serve his 6 years in a Nigerian jail.

And in the end...

[damn_registrars]

... it won't make a damned bit of difference in the overall spamming epidemic. One spammer thrown in jail is like stomping on an ant colony; it might give some immediate satisfaction to those who are of that persuasion, but there are still trillions of ants left doing the same thing.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: spam is an economic problem. If the US wrote 500 new anti-spam laws today, making it illegal to so much as consider sending out spam, it wouldn't matter worth shit. People who are sending out spam today do it because people pay them to do it; and they will find places to send it from so that they can keep making money at it. They all know that the US laws aren't worth anything anywhere outside the US (and their worth inside the US is debatable as well), which is part of why we see so much spam come from other countries.

Re:And in the end...

[geekoid]

It's an education problem.
Educate people not to reply.

Bot-nets are an economic problem.

Re:And in the end...

[damn_registrars]

It's an education problem. Educate people not to reply.

That is a pie-in-the-sky approach. You cannot possibly "educate" every person with an email address in the world to not reply to spam.

If you can remove the economic incentive of spam, then - and only then - will spam go away. Until then spammers will always make sales for the spamvertised domains, and hence the spammers will always get paid for their work. Which means we will all continue to see more spam.

Re:And in the end...

[bhiestand]

It's an education problem.
Educate people not to reply.

That is a pie-in-the-sky approach. You cannot possibly "educate" every person with an email address in the world to not reply to spam.

If you can remove the economic incentive of spam, then - and only then - will spam go away. Until then spammers will always make sales for the spamvertised domains, and hence the spammers will always get paid for their work. Which means we will all continue to see more spam.

Now to quote your sig...

Do you really have enough information to support your claim?

Do you?

I've seen some pretty solid evidence that a lot of spamvertised domains don't actually profit from it, but there's no shortage of new customers so the spammers keep making profits without having to worry about retaining customers.

Re:And in the end...

[damn_registrars]

Do you really have enough information to support your claim?

Do you?

Actually, yes, I do.

I've seen some pretty solid evidence that a lot of spamvertised domains don't actually profit from it, but there's no shortage of new customers so the spammers keep making profits without having to worry about retaining customers.

I would like to see the evidence you speak of. In support of my claim, I offer The SpamHaus entry of Leo Kuvayev. We see that Mr. Kuvayev (who uses several aliases as well) repeatedly uses spam for the same companies, using the same web pages. The contact info all goes back to the same place for his new customers. Whoever is paying him for his spamming services is buying his services repeatedly.

And this is very common in the spam enterprise.

Detroit News Article About This

[Czmyt]

Here is a very good Detroit News article about this that has some additional background: 'Spam King' pleads guilty to fraud. It seems like he should be jailed immediately pending sentencing, especially since he pled guilty. I hope the scumbag dies in prison.

Re:Detroit News Article About This

[Vegeta99]

That asshat lives in a house that lost "2.5 homes-I-grew-up-in" in value since 2002.

Burn in hell... or state prison.

sentence: hand email apology for every spam mail

[peter303]

Thats should keep them busy for decades.

For a low life scum, he done well..

[Lead Butthead]

Living in this home --

http://www.realtor.com/property-detail/6747-Minnow-Pond-Dr_West-Bloomfield_MI_48322_cc4f3302

while a lot of us, his victims, are just scraping by.

Re:For a low life scum, he done well..

[geekoid]

Yes, that moment you spent not reading his spam is the difference between living in your home and a mansion.

This guy cause for people to make money they he got.
really, if spam went away a lot of admins would be out of work.

Lot of good that did

[xrayspx]

Now it's all about the Facebook spam?. Either West Bloomfield, MI is the spam capital of the world, or these guys operations are bravely soldiering on.

I am not discounting either possibility.

ok 87 months in Jail

[teknosapien]

Thats equal to just over 7 years if he does all the time and the fine of 1 million - lets just say the .gov probably didn't get it all when they were arrested. there is probably may times that amount in some numbered account so chances are he's made his Cash and we'll never hear from him again

$1MM ?!?!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me get this straight. You attempt to bilk millions of dollars out of millions of people and you get hit with a fine of $1MM (of course, the jail time isn't negligible) but you have 24 songs on you computer and you get hit with twice that fine? Something smells funny.