Infamous Spammer Indicted

The FBI spent three years investigating, but they finally indicted one of the worst spammers the Internet has ever seen. Alan Ralsky has one of the largest files on record at Spamhaus, and is known to use botnets, hijacked proxies, hacked mail servers and lots more underhanded methods to send out terragajillions of spam messages, including fake stock alerts, known as pump and dump scams.

From Reuters here:

A federal grand jury in Detroit has indicted a Michigan man dubbed the “spam king,” and 10 others, in an international illegal bulk e-mailing and stock fraud scheme, the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday.

The 41-count indictment charges Alan Ralsky, 52, of West Bloomfield, Michigan, his son-in-law, and nine others with operating an spamming operation that focused on running a stock “pump and dump” scheme.

“Today’s charges seek to knock out one of the largest illegal spamming and fraud operations in the country, an international scheme to make money by manipulating stock prices through illegal spam e-mail promotions,” U.S. Attorney Stephen Murphy said in a statement.

Under the scheme, the group sent spam touting thinly traded Chinese penny stocks, drove up their stock price, and reaped profits by selling the stock at artificially inflated prices, the statement said.

How infamous was Ralsky? He has his own Wikipedia entry here. Spamhaus’ list of illegal activity is 96 records long.  A sickening article that describes his operations in a huge mansion that spam financed for him, and how he plans to incorporate viruses and malware is here.