Major Spammers Receive Jail Time

No one I know likes spam, either the often unidentified e-mail that is of no real value or the processed meat product, which is why the name was given to the unwanted e-mail that continues to clog the ever increasing pipes we craft to carry information. The amount of spam carried at any one time one the internet is staggering, though it has differing estimates of actual size. It is, in a word, huge.

Perhaps that is why I was immediately drawn to an article that had the title “‘Godfather Of Spam’ Gets Four Years In Prison” on InformationWeek. The story tells how a major spammer and three of his cohorts all received jail time for a fraud perpetrated on the public, and about the trial that had begun in 2007.

Notorious spammer Alan M. Ralsky, from West Bloomfield, Mich., was sentenced to more than four years in prison on Monday for his involvement in a stock fraud spam scheme.

Three of his associates — Ralsky’s son-in-law Scott Bradley, also from West Bloomfield, John S. Bown, from Fresno, Calif., and How Wai John Hui, a resident of Hong Kong and Canada — also received prison sentences.

Bradley and Hui received 51 month sentences, like Ralsky, while Bown received a 32 month sentence.

Indicted in December 2007, the four men subsequently pleaded guilty to wire fraud, mail fraud, and CAN-SPAM Act violations, among other charges.

“With today’s sentence of the self-proclaimed ‘Godfather of Spam,’ Alan Ralsky, and three others who played central roles in a complicated stock spam pump-and-dump scheme, the Court has made it clear that advancing fraud through abuse of the Internet will lead to several years in prison,” said U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg for the Eastern District of Michigan in a statement.

This is but one, there are so many more to be prosecuted. The time lag shows how inefficient our legal system is, and no mater how much attention is devoted to a just process, we all know it is still too drawn out a process.

Berg commended the FBI, the Postal Inspection Service, and the IRS Criminal Investigative Division for their respective roles in the three-year investigation that halted the illegal spamming.

You know it’s been a bad day at Black Rock when the IRS and the Postal Service are the good guys.

The pump-and-dump scheme involved sending spam messages to promote the sale of “pink sheet” stocks, thereby artificially inflating the price so that prior holders of the stock could sell for a profit.

Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer declared that the sentences handed down to Ralsky and his associates send “a powerful message to spammers whose goal is to manipulate financial transactions and the stock market through illegal e-mail advertisements.”

I fear that the trial might have never occurred had there not been that stock market component. The average spam has little to do with the stock market, and so the spammers get by with much, as their crime is not considered anything more than a minor infraction. While in part that is true, together all spammers make everyone’s life more miserable, and more expensive.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) in October reported that while Q3′09 average spam levels were down 8% from Q2′09, the overall number of spam bytes processed per user has grown, with Q3′09 rates up 123% from Q3′08.

In other words, the decline in the number of spam messages has been more than made up for by the increase in the size of spam messages.

I would really like to see some aggressive anti-spam features built into e-mail programs. A feature that would essentially ‘bounce’ spam back to its origin, effectively clogging the spammer’s connection with so many hits that it would grind to a halt would be a great addition to any modern mailer. It is clear that legislation is not going to be the end of most spam, and filtering only encourages more of the same, as the spammer’s continue to change things to make it through the filters.

I think it might be time to fight fire with fire.

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