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[barefoottech]

Russia’s Biggest Spammer Murdered E-mail
Chris Hunter
Monday, 25 July 2005
Mosnews reports that a prolific Russian spammer has been found dead after suffering repeated blows to the head.

Vardan Kushnir headed up the American language center and was one, if not the worst spammer in Russia.

"American Language Center was the most prominent and the most famous spammer in Russia around 2002-2003. As the name suggests, the company is a language center that taught American English, with the emphasis on verbal skills. The company is based in Moscow.

The company regularly and indiscriminantly sent astronomical amounts of spam to Russian Internet users, promoting the telephone numbers of its office.

The company managed to successfully defeat anti-spam filtering for a long time by applying the latest tricks (garbled words to defeat filtering, text in image to defeat smart filtering, deformed images to defeat OCR). There is probably no spamming technique that wasn't used, including spamming in media other than e-mail, such as forums, blogs, e-commerce sites, ICQ, etc." [wikipedia]

They received several death threats but continued spamming due to loopholes (or non existant) Russian Laws.

In a retalliation attempt to create an offline DDOS attack, Internet users started posting the phone numbers at dating sites pretending the numbers belong to attractive and "easy" girls, at bulletin boards, for example pretending to sell a good car for below market price.

The users also participated in phone DDOS campaigns themselves, with thousands of angry calls on one day. An online magazine encouraged its readers to call and pretend to sign up for the courses or request extensive information.

The conspiracy theories have inevitably started with webpronews asking the question 'Did Anti-spam gang kill russian spammer?'

An example of the spam being sent can be seen here at NANAS

Death from spam?

Send a copy of this to your next Spammer
They might at last get the Message

 

[HHDomains]

I don't see anything acceptable about someone getting beaten to death regardless of if he was a spammer or not.

 

[vip-ip]

Yes, that is true Pic: http://pics.rbc.ru/img/top/2005/03/31/killed250.jpg
And I'm kind of glad they did, cuz these e-mails are EXTREMELY annoying to all Russians, incl. me :/ I hope other spammers got the message

 

[CrazyTech]

I agree HH but this is an all too real example of what happens in today's world when you participate in activities that cause problems with others. That doesn't justify taking the life of anyone but it's a real risk you take. Perhaps that will hit home to some.

 

[Sabre]

Good idea, if you get that spam, send that email back! ^^

 

[HHDomains]

I agree HH but this is an all too real example of what happens in today's world when you participate in activities that cause problems with others. That doesn't justify taking the life of anyone but it's a real risk you take. Perhaps that will hit home to some.

No one really knows what all this guy was into.
There is a very good possibility that his death was not related in any way to his spamming activities.

Either way, some people here seem to take pleasure in the death of a human being over the inconvenience of some unwanted emails. That's shows a definite character flaw.

 

[Dave_Z]

Vardan Kushnir, you've been served!

Sheesh, what a way to be served...

 

[CrazyTech]

No one really knows what all this guy was into.
There is a very good possibility that his death was not related in any way to his spamming activities.

Doesn't matter. We see this happen often with the road rage issue amongst others. It's a calculated risk in today's world.