FBI raid shuts down world's most prolific spammer

 
Warrants unsealed last week show that the FBI raided Alan Ralsky's 8,000-square-foot luxury home in September and seized computers, disks and financial records.

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Ralsky's $740,000 property is said to have been funded by the profits from the 100 million emails that he is believed to send every day.

The home of Ralsky's son-in-law, Scott Bradley, was also raided.

The court documents reveal the purpose of the raid was to seek evidence that Ralsky sent unsolicited commercial e-mail using at least 14 different domain names, which is a possible violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.

Ralsky has long been identified as one of the world's largest spammers by anti-spam organization Spamhaus. The group describes him as a convicted felon who uses virus-infected PCs to send spam, and claims that he has hacked mail servers in the past to spread his spam.

Ralsky: "When you're sending out 250 million e-mails, even a blind squirrel will find a nut"

Ralsky claims that he is not a spammer, but a legitimate email marketer who abides by the law.

"There is no way this can be stopped," Ralsky said. "It's a perfectly legal business that has allowed anybody to compete with the Fortune 500 companies."

Ralsky makes his money by charging the companies that hire him to send bulk e-mail a commission on sales. He sometimes charges just a flat fee, up to $22,000, for a single mailing to his 250 million e-mail addresses database.

Alan Ralsky, 60, seems an incongruous character in an industry largely made up of men from the Nintendo generation. "You have a bunch of kids in their late 20's doing this with a lot more technical knowledge than I have. But they don't have any business sense."

However, Ralsky acknowledges that his success with spam arose out of a less-than-impressive business background. In 1992, while in the insurance business, he served a 50-day jail term for a charge arising out of the sale of unregistered securities. And in 1994, he was convicted of falsifying documents that defrauded financial institutions in Michigan and Ohio and ordered to pay $74,000 in restitution.

He lost his license to sell insurance and he declared personal bankruptcy. But in 1997, he sold a late model green Toyota and used the money to pay back taxes on his house and buy two computers.

A friend had told him about mass marketing on the Internet, and he thought it made sense. He bought a couple of mailing lists from advertising brokers and, with the help of the computers, launched a new career that soon was making him $6,000 a week.

Verizon Communications sued him in 2001, saying he shut down its networks with millions of e-mail solicitations. He settled, promising not to send spam on its networks.

Anti-spam groups and Verizon hailed the settlement as a major victory in the war against spam. But that war still feels far away, down on the lower level of Ralsky's home, where racks of computers instruct scores of other computers halfway around the world to fire off millions of e-mails every day.

"We're out of business at this point in time," Ralsky said. "They didn't shut us down. They took all our equipment, which had the effect of shutting us down."

 
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