Good riddance.

--Previous Message--
: Alan Ralsky, the so-called "Godfather of spam" was
: yesterday sentenced by a federal judge in Detroit to spend the
: next 51 months of his life in prison for wire fraud, mail fraud,
: and violations of the CAN-SPAM act.
:
: Not content simply to move boxes of pills or to sign people up
: for new mortgages, Ralsky's operation instead pulled in millions
: of dollars through "pump and dump" schemes of thinly
: traded stocks in companies you've never heard of. Millions of
: e-mails would announce some hot new "Internet
: IPO!!!!!" just about to drop, and - amazingly - some people
: would want in on the action. Since the stocks in question were
: low-volume "pink sheets" stocks, even low levels of
: activity could boost the stock price, at which point the owners
: would sell and forward tens of thousands of dollars from Hong
: Kong to the Standard Federal Bank in Troy, Michigan.
:
: A scheme like this required a certain amount of sophistication,
: and Ralsky appears to have run it like a real business. He was
: the chief executive, and his son-in-law, Scott Bradley, was the
: chief financial officer. John Bown, CEO of network
: administration company GDC Layer One, was the "chief
: technology officer and network systems manager" for the
: spammers. William Neil served as the chief operating officer and
: registered many of the hundreds of bogus domain names used by
: the group.
:
: The conspiracy was global. Although Ralsky and Bradley both
: lived in West Bloomfield, Michigan, members of their team
: operated from New York, Brazil, California, Hong Kong, and
: Dayton, Ohio, and included coders, a stockbroker, a Chinese CEO,
: and network admins.
:
: Ralsky has been at his tricks for years, and eventually acquired
: a reputation as one of the world's top spammers. Court documents
: show that when the spammers recruited someone who claimed he
: could get 20 million e-mails a day into AOL and Hotmail, the man
: was awestruck to find out that he was joining Ralsky's
: operation. "King of spam wants to rent me," he wrote
: in an instant message. "Cool." (The man eventually
: made several hundred thousand dollars from his work for Ralsky.)
:
: The Spamhaus description of Ralsky says that "he has grown
: from a small time operator, under the 'Additional Benefits'
: moniker, to one of the bigger spam houses on the Internet with a
: gang of fellow morally challenged types working with him to pump
: out every type of sleazy deal and scam offer into millions of
: internet users' mailboxes."
:
: Ralsky wasn't always careful. He would recruit coders from sites
: like "special ham" (spam) using the "amr777"
: handle, and his team tried to cloak its e-mail discussions about
: proxies by using the fairly transparent replacement
: "p's," "peas," "proximate," and
: "p s."
:
: Ralsky and company earned more than $2.6 million between May 1
: and December 1, 2005 alone, but the feds were closing in. A
: three-year investigation by the FBI, the US Postal Inspection
: Service, and the Internal Revenue Service (with a little help
: from the SEC) untangled the conspiracy. In 2007, the government
: moved to indict the entire conspiracy.
:
: Yesterday, the lead defendants were finally sentenced after
: pleading guilty in June 2009. Ralsky and his son-in-law got 51
: months and 40 months in jail, respectively, and had to forfeit
: the cash associated with the spamming scheme. They will be on
: probation after their release. How Wai John Hui, the
: Chinese/Canadian CEO who helped arrange the stocks for use in
: the scheme, also got 51 months. John Bown got 32 months for
: setting up a botnet used to send the e-mails. A handful of
: others will be sentenced today.
:
: