Anti-spam efforts have borne
fruit with the ‘Godfather’ of spam being sentenced to over 4 years in
jail.
It is said that when a giant falls, we all feel the ground
shake; and this
is exactly what happened when Alan Ralsky, possibly amongst the biggest
spammers
ever, was indicted for mail fraud. He was sentenced to over 4 years in
prison
along with his accomplices for persistently sending unsolicited junk
email
over a sustained period of time.
In a ruling that sends out a clear message to chronic
spammers, 64-year-old
Ralsky was not only handed a stiff prison sentence, but will also
forego the
$250,000 that the government seized from him two years ago and be under
special
surveillance for five years after his release.
Having earned a reputation as the mastermind behind
innumerable fraudulent
email campaigns, Ralsky misused technology to dupe unsuspecting
recipients
of thousands of dollars. Typically, Ralsky and his associates would
first buy
large quantities of a relatively unknown microcap stock. Next, they
would send
email blasts falsely informing recipients that it was a great
buy and wait
until some of them bought the stock. When the stock price went up
because of
heavy buying activity, Ralsky and the other fraudsters would sell their
shares
at a healthy profit.
According to Spamhaus.org, a prominent anti-spam group, Ralsky
had been involved
in many similar ‘pump-and-dump’ scams since as far back as 1997.
During the process, it is suspected that he used hundreds of computers
or ‘zombies’ to
send out junk email from many different aliases. Besides Ralsky, Scott
Bradley,
his son-in-law, and How Wai John Hui, from Canada, have been indicted
in connection
with the case.
This development once again makes it abundantly clear that you
should always
be careful when dealing with unsolicited email communication. If you’re
a marketer who cares about reputation, it’s probably a good idea to
make
sure that your
email campaign is playing by the rules and, if possible,
measuring
up to the highest standards of email marketing—something you can be
assured
of with Benchmark Email.
Source: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/11/spam_godfather_alan_ralsky_get.html?wprss=securityfix
