Spam King Rumored To Be In Jail As Spam Underworld Worries...
from the so-they-say dept
Alan Ralsky, the well known "spam king" who proudly bragged about his spamming escapades to a newspaper reporter... and then got all upset when people who read the article started signing his home address up for junk mail, is apparently in trouble with the law again. Last fall, the FBI raided his house, and now Silicon Valley gossip blog, Valleywag, has an unconfirmed report from someone saying that Ralsky's now in jail. The report also notes that the spamming underworld is freaking out on the rumor that he's going to cough up some sort of plea bargain that involves ratting just about everyone out. It would be nice to see some sort of confirmation on the story one way or the other. Ralsky is definitely considered a big fish in the spamming pond (or should that be swamp?), so it will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes of this. Update: The story was unconfirmed for a reason. InfoWorld is now reporting that, as far as they can tell, it might not be true at all.
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Home in MI
The house is big, it was dark through the windows (though the basement lights were on, supposedly where he keeps his office) and there was some moderately fancy car in the driveway IIRC.
Certainly, he made a lot of money and would probably be making a very smart career move to get away lightly if he makes a deal -- he's fairly old, right? Probably somewhere in the age range of retirement, I'd assume? Maybe this is his "easy" way out?
Interesting stuff, nonetheless.
Ian
P.S. We were there mid-afternoon on a weekday -- usually when my mail arrives -- but didn't see a giant pile of mail anywhere or a separate truck coming. Just a regular, old mailbox. :( We were really hoping to see how much he really received. ;)
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Spam King
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Spam Dirtbag
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Spam king
this whole campaign against spam is misguided and is releasing the government from it's responsibility to protect us from real harm.
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Re: Spam king
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Re: Spam king
2) People coming to my door don't cost me money. Spam cost me money because it cost my ISP money. It cost my ISP money because a good chunk of their bandwidth is being used to spread spam that no one wants, and bandwidth cost money.
3) I really don't think you understand the spam's impact on the Internet beyond your own inbox.
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Re: Spam king
http://tqmcube.com/spamcost.php
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Re: Spam king
I'm the system administrator for a small company, and a good part of my morning is spent going through the company's spam filter. The messages are frightening. Bestiality, fraudulent schemes, penis enlargment ads...it's like picking through a sewer.
Spammers are swine and they belong in prison.
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Re: Spam king
As for wasting government resources, if spams don't exist, there won't be any government resources to waste on!!!
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i had a server, once. spammer hijacked an insecure script and sent out millions of spams. server got blackisted, no one with accounts on it could send mail almost anywhere. getting off spam blacklists is nearly impossible; clients all found hosting elsewhere.
lost my fledgling hosting business, moved my own sites to a small hosting account. forgot to set one of the spammed-up domains to :fail: unroutable mail.
next time i went to upload something (three weeks later) the account was full. sixty seven thousand spams in the inbox, in three weeks.
it goes way beyond door to door religion. it's a business defined by its total lack of ethics. all i can say is, i do hope he is in jail. on a related note, i hear fist can be a verb.
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Last Post!
Last Post
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Re:
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Re:
As an aside, unconfirmed reports of someone maybe possibly being in jail are not newsworthy.
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sentencing phase
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THe solution is clear: we just need to find those idiots and kill them. Then the profits dry up and so does the spam.
Just a modest proposal.
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Re:
Unfortunately I think it's people new to the net that respond to spam, and are the sole money makers. Most people who've used email for more than a few months know the scam, but people sitting down in front of the computer for the first time probably fall for it.
Maybe this stuff should be taught in school. A whole year of learning about spam, phishing, viruses... and we'll even throw real world cons in there. Con-men have been using the same cons forever because people continue to fall for them. People need to be educated about this kind of stuff.
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This is all very interesting but...
I see my gmail account fill up, I moderate on lists where users complain about their "bigger dick" emails and I shudder while thinking how lame it is that we are perceiving this technology that we depend upon with such pedestrian choler. Spewing from an ignorant place and from a common lack of understanding of a complex situation really just distracts us from doing something to actually help this issue. However, I'm giggling over the thought of him eating all of his spam - Ironic humor is fun after all!
It's funny also, how simple solutions can be to people who have no idea what the real problem is that they're attempting to solve. I love the "intelligent sounding" posts that are mostly illiterate and uninformed. I invite the people reading this to ask questions for clarification for a change, ask for examples of how this REALLY affects their life, and ask for guidance on how to protect themsleves going forward. SPAM and phishing are tactics of theives who depend upon our ignorance. If we are collectively less ignorant, then it is probable that the spammers and phishers will be less successsful.
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Possible SPAM Solution
An idea (perhaps already stated). How about the FED sets up a national DO NOT EMAIL list, similar to the DO NOT CALL list. While it is far from perfect, the FED could pass a law that says any spammers that mail anyone on this list is fined some amount of money and or penalized appropriately.
An idea...
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Re: Possible SPAM Solution
That's already been quashed by the DOC, which is resisting calls by Congress and others to set up a "Do not email" list. They have a point, disposable email address/domains as well as the fact that spam comes from proxied email servers doesn't stop the real criminal ... the spammer ... from continuing his/her practices.
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Naive Pro-spammers
And if the spammers feel that what they are doing is not wrong and not illegal, then why do they attempt to hide?
It is also wrong to say that spam is anything like Junk Mail received through one's letterbox - I receive almost no such mail, because in most cases there is a real opt-out clause. And if someone hawks his wares on my doorstep, I can politely ask them not to return. In fact I no longer receive visits from those Jehovah's Witnesses since I discovered that you can request to be put on their "do not call list".
The spammers owe their success, in the most part, to disceit and dishonesty - that is why they operate underground.
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Re: Naive Pro-spammers
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We pay for service, then pay to see advertisements
As far as the internet spamming issue, I really don't get it? Spamming doesn't work, yet these companies just keep pushing it out there. If I receive spam from a company, it actually turns me off from a company and their products. How could they possibly think that spam is a way to increase revenue without doing more harm to their reputation than good?
In the long run, no matter how you look at it, spam could not possibly make a company more money than it will make them lose between advertising expenses and the negative feedback caused by the spamming. I just don't understand how these companies aren't getting that?
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Get Blue Frog
Link
*Note: Yes there is a referal address in this link, but there is absolutely no financial benefit in me doing it. It just keeps track in how many people you refer.
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Spam Works
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I love spam
Wat could be more enjoyable than a larger penis, or a new "house over the internet"
Alan Ralsky should be shot in a slow and paniful and fatal manner. And have a celebration...
Then we shud get the other spammers and shoot their hands off so they will have a job typing the next spam mail
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Vigilante Justice
Oh, Leno's on? Okay after that. Oh you've got to get your Suburban serviced tomorrow? Well what about next week?
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Re: Vigilante Justice
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Spam "King" terminology
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The porn email is the absolute worst!
The last straw (no pun intended) was when some idiot sent me a free trial membership to a porn site. The 'enticement' photo was one of, well, a man and his horse. I actually forwarded that email to my local FBI office. From that moment on, I set my email to only receive text messages and if I don't recognize the sender, I delete the email instantly. Or I 'read' the code of the email by clicking on properties, details and then message source. I do this any time I get what might be a spoof email. Esp. Ebay/Paypal/banking type emails. If the links are bogus then I delete it without ever opening the email. If I'm not sure then I delete it anyways.
The other thing that I have done is created a message rule for the email that I get regularly for work and business. An Ebay email that comes directly from them codes as a specific color. The spam emails don't get colored or flagged because the sender's email doesn't match my Outlook Express rule. That makes it easy to quickly just delete groups of bogus emails, and you don't have to be a computer genius to figure out how to set up a system with the Outlook Express message rules.
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Oddly enough...
With this in mind, I can't grasp getting 800 spam messages in one time... I fully endorse Thunderbird to anyone who wants to avoid all those messages.
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DUMBASS!
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Re: DUMBASS!
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lol
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To All
Drive a car and look at the hazzards, but our instructors told us of these.
Do you people walk down dark alleys at night? NNNOOOOO
Do you walk up to the biggest guy in the bar and call his mama o whore? NNOOOOOO
There are hazzards among us no matter what we do. So simply educate yourselves and get a good antispam program...(NEWSFLASH) They are free through microsoft
PS Hangin is to good for this Bastard. But I would PAY for this porn. To see ole Alan share A cell With BuBBa !
Boomer
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Personally I don`t use spam filters or email screeners.I just don`t trust the filters themselves. I find the best thing (for me that is, people are welcome to their opinions right? Lest Boomer start going apeshit again) is to switch off active content in your email application, or use a good old fashioned text based email client like PINE, and screen all your emails yourself. Of course, if the amount of spam in your inbox becomes more than your actual mail, its time to throw out that account, and be more careful next time with whom you share your email address.
I have several email accounts and give the public webmail ones to sites I don`t trust. Work email for work, personal for personal, other for other. As with all things in life, safety first, trust later.
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Re:
More people should use sneakemail.
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has anyone considered this...
That would surely start to depreciate the pool of those willing to use spam to sell their illicite wares.
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Re: What's $0.10 times 245 million?
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Why not an e-stamp.
This is many benefits:
1) people sending out millions of emails will be charged hundreds of thousands of dollars. So spammer's profits are severely cut.
2) Since real money is involved, people will be actively looking at their computer's bandwidth; ie zombies will be hunted down.
3) legitimate email lists will be forced to track their advertising, making it an opt-in instead of an opt-out, thus reducing their costs as well as total global bandwidth.
4) ultimately it does not have to be a real monetary cost. It could even be a 'token' system, where after x amount of tokens spent (and not replenished) from a server, that server is black listed, or only a single email is accepted per minute.
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Better Laws vs. Smarter Users
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Write Over
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The economics of murder
Spam depends in large measure on zombies which in turn depend by and large on the vulnerabilities in Windows.
Microsoft can spend $100 Billion making Windows secure and protecting a franchise worth hundreds of billions of dollars or they can pay the Mafia $1 Billion to hunt down and kill all of the spammers and virus writers.
Spam and viruses have cost Microsoft shareholders far more than any profit ever made by the spammers and virus writers. The economic efficiency of murder seems pretty compelling to me. Particularly since you would only have to kill a handful of people around the world to make a big dent in the problem.
The lives of the spammers and virus writers are not worth the billions of dollars they are costing the economy. If Microsoft felt guilty about such a practise they could rationalize it by taking some of the profit and dedicating it to saving lives in the third world so that there is a net saving of lives.
Heck, Microsoft does not even have to be directly involved. The Mafia could buy some call options and then simply ANNOUNCE that they are going to kill spammers and virus writers.
;-)
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Ralsky
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business
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SPAM does suck!
I am a Network Engineer and spam isn't some nuisance to simply be deleted and... end-of-story.
No, spam is a large technical problem on the back-end of all mail networks. It's a big pain in the arse logistically, technically and socially.
This guy did not find a way to make money either. This guy found a way to hold people hostage, and craftily deceive them out of their time, money, and resources. He is nothing more than a socialogical virus!
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Spamming does not start jobs.
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DEATH PENALTY TO THE SPAMMERS
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The real problem....
However, this guy Alan, he is not the problem. In fact he is probably the smaller problem. Lets consider numbers. This guy is supposed to email like 300 million people. ok. he cant do that ten times a day. Its just not possible. he is getting one, maybe two emails out a day. its the little spammers, which there are 1000's of, that have small lists of like 10 million that they bought off some guy who stole them from what ever means. They send out more email ‘cause there list is shorter. they run there list in an hour and then run it again with the next ad, and they are doing this 24 hours a day. They are the main problem.
The fact is spam is not going to end, but if you had a few large guys that are allowed to send one or two emails a day, and then anyone who wants to advertise has to go through them, there would be less spam. it would be more like commercials on TV. The amount would be controlled.
Maybe I am an idiot, but I would rather receive 10 emails from controlled spammers, than 100 from all the little freaks that send me donkey sex pics, and tell me my wife has been talking all over town about how small my dick is. (not that she isn't, but I don’t want to know about it)
Anyways, that’s my two cents. Not that anyone cares……..
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Vigilante action
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