Godfather of Spam sentenced to four years in jail
Alan Ralsky, the man the FBI dubbed the Godfather of Spam, has finally been punished for his crimes. He has been sentenced to more than four years in jail and his spam ring have also been dealt serious spells on prison.
Spam email is one of those things that has become part of everyday life. Thankfully, most are caught in modern and aggressive spam filters, and most people have enough common sense and wherewithal to avoid reading or responding to the ones that do manage to sneak through. However, some people clearly do read and respond to spam because otherwise the people behind the mass emailings would cease operations.
Rather than spamming people with offers of penis enlargements and Viagra, Ralsky operated a much bigger and more clever operation. He and his cohorts instead got rich off the back of pump and dump campaigns designed to up the price of unknown stocks which would then net the spammers a fortune.
According to PC World, Ralsky and his team of spammers would send unsolicited emails promoting “pink sheet” stocks. These were stocks in U.S. companies that were owned and traded in Hong Kong and China. The more gullible recipients of these emails announcing new IPOs that shouldn’t be missed bought shares in the company. This artificially inflated prices and enabled Ralsky and co. to buy low and sell high. Thus netting an absolute fortune.
This type of scheme netted Ralsky $2.7 million in the summer of 2005. But he was finally caught after a three-year investigation by the FBI, the US Postal Inspection Service, and the IRS managed to get him convicted of conspiring to commit wire fraud, mail fraud, and violating the CAN-SPAM act.
Ralsky pleaded guilty and was yesterday sentenced to 51 months in federal prison. His son-in-law, Scott Bradley, received 40 months in prison, while two others involved in the scheme have also received long prison terms. Five others are still awaiting sentencing, while a further two individuals are still being investigated.
This scheme was clearly an ingenious one that worked in generating pocketfuls of money. The problem is that every single individual who responded to the spam emails and bought shares were only ever going to put money in Ralsky’s pocket and not their own.
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November 25th, 2009
The larger probem is that legal action took FAR TOO LONG to get started. The spammers are SO FAR AHEAD now that we will never be rid of spam. Filters and such only mask the problem, the number of spam emails and the amount of resources required to process them and filter them out keeps rising, adding cost to every user’s internet access worlwide.
It’s too bad the original creators of SMTP were too altruistic to imagine that their free and open tool for sending emails without requiring any sort of authentication or validation.