Tech Shout!

Around a fortnight back we had reported about the arrest of ‘Spam King’ Richard Alan Soloway by Feds in Seattle.

Touted as the ‘worst abuser of the internet in history,’ Soloway was prosecuted in a Seattle courtroom on charges of mail fraud, fraud in connection with electronic mail, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering.

Robert Alan Soloway, has been accused for using networks of compromised “zombie’’ computers to send out millions of spam e-mails. Paradoxically, Soloway of Washington, is the founder of the so-called “Strategic Partnership Against Microsoft Illegal Spam”, or SPAMIS, but is himself said to be one of the Internet’s biggest spammers through his company, Newport Internet Marketing.

However, ironically the week following 27 year-old Soloway’s imprisonment, the flow of spam went up by 8 percent.

This info was revealed by communications security firm Postini Inc. of San Carlos which publishes the number of spam it filters for its clients on an ongoing basis. The California-based company tallied 2.8 billion spams over the most recent seven-day period, as opposed to 2.6 billion in the seven days before Soloway’s arrest.

Data tabulated by the London-based Spamhaus Project, which is an international anti-spam organization, has found that approximately 80 percent of the world’s spam is produced by about 130 separate spammers or gangs. Soloway was on the list; however he was amongst the Top 10, which consists of four Russians, two Ukrainians, an Israeli, an Australian, an American, and a Hong Kong resident.

Speaking about the ironical advantage of spam scams, John Levine of Trumansburg, New York, co-author of “Fighting Spam for Dummies,” told LiveScience, “The vast majority of recipients throw it away, but spam is so cheap to send that the spammers can make money even with an infinitesimally small response rate — maybe one in a million.” Levine further added, “Soloway supported himself for years sending spam, and reportedly made 700,000 U.S. dollars per year at it.”

Levine continued that even as e-mail negates the expense of envelopes, paper, and stamps, spammers also use other people’s computers, infected machines that churn out spam in the background. By doing this, innumerable spasm can be sent by them, which can go up to millions of messages in a matter of a day’s time. The method also makes it harder to find the original spammer down.

Pump-and-dump schemes are also a common tactic amongst spammers, as per Spamhaus. In the pump-and-dump schemes, the spammers send out claiming a little-known stock that they have bought. This “pump-and-dump” process is characteristic of what’s also called “Spam 2.0.” Most of the times, enough recipients buy it so that the price goes up, enabling the spammer to sell at a profit.