Prison Terms For Spammer Ralsky, Scientology DoS Attacker

tsu doh nimh writes "Alan Ralsky, the 64-year-old dubbed the 'Godfather of Spam,' was sentenced to 51 months in prison on Monday, the Washington Post's Security Fix blog reports. According to anti-spam group Spamhaus.org, Ralsky has been spamming since at least 1997, using dozens of aliases and tens of thousands of 'zombies' or hacked PCs to relay junk e-mail. Also sentenced — to 40 months in jail — was Ralsky's 48-year-old son-in-law, Scott K. Bradley, and two other men named last year in a 41-count indictment for wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering and violations of the CAN-SPAM Act." And eldavojohn writes "19-year-old Dmitriy Guzner, Anonymous member and Scientology DDoS attacker, received one year and one day in jail for his admitted crime. His sentence could have been a maximum ten years. According to the Church of Scientology, Anonymous has harassed and attacked them with '8,139 threatening phone calls, 3.6 million e-mails, 141 million hits on its website, ten acts of vandalism against its property, 22 bomb threats, and eight death threats against Church leaders.'"

Comments

dark side of the coin

[czarangelus]

It's funny to me that the people who complain about spam the most are also the "information wants to be free" types. You can't have it both ways. Freedom of speech, freedom of data transmission also applies to hawkers of Viiagr11a and c1la15!!) doesn't it? As to DDoS attacks, how many times are you allowed to knock on a church's door before it becomes illegal? Though you might agree with this particular case, it opens up the door for more intrusive precedents. Once you allow the government to ban heroin, you give them jurisdiction over your body that will become more and more intrusive.

Re:Church of Scientology

[jim_v2000]

When was the last time you were harassed by a Scientology member?

Re:scientology

[A beautiful mind]

Scientology is an efficient church. They are focusing on what a church usually does: scamming people out of their money and scamming them for control.