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Moscow police said the 31-year-old, who by now has fled the country, was a central figure in the operations of SpamIt.com, a website that paid spammers to promote online pharmacies. SpamIt.com suddenly stopped operating on September 27 and Gusev's house was raided this week. His illegal spam network helped earn his partner company $120 million. With less financial incentive to send their junk mail, spammers reduced their activity by an estimated 50 billion messages a day.
Gusev and SpamIt.com had both been operating openly in Moscow for several years until Russia decided enough was enough. There are still 200 billion unwanted e-mails sent off every day, but cutting the world's spam by one fifth is a great start. Unfortunately, taking history into account, we wouldn't be surprised if that number went back up in a few weeks; the SpamIt.com website will simply be replaced.
In the meantime, Russia has opened a criminal case against Gusev for flooding the Internet with advertisements for Viagra, operating a pharmacy without a license, and operating a business without registration. This is unprecedented in Russia, since the country is known as a haven for spammers, but Western partners are pressuring the country to clamp down on abuse of the Internet.
User Comments: 59
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50 billion messages a day! Wow... I'm glad they took down this guy. Maybe my google filter wont have to work as hard now. I always do like reading the spam recipes on gmail though...
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Holy smokes. One man was responsible for 20% of the spam. Just wait until they catch the other 4.
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I don't even really notice spam anymore, google does a pretty good job of catching 99.9% of it for me.
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why did he do this did he got some money for each mail or what
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In communist russia, spam blocks you.
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customcarvin said: I cant understand how these companys would actually make money off of spamming, I mean has anyone here, or anyone you know ever clicked on one of these "save money on viagra" links, or something similar? Honestly? I wonder how much they pay guys like Mr. Gusev to do this dirty work, and i wonder how many real bites they get from suckers that buy this junk. I can't imagine they make much bank. People can't seriously be that stupid, can they?
it's very likely you can go through life and not meet 1 person who's purchased anything via spam advert.
The problem with spam profitability is that you're dealing with ridiculously large numbers. If you send out 200 billion emails, then all you need is a 0.000005% purchase rate to still make 1 million sales.
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Damn.. 50 billion. That's A LOT. I somehow don't get any spam at all, only normal letters and newsletters and stuff like that. The war against spammers still continues.
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If 20% comes from one guy in Rusia, how much more spam really comes from Rusia? At least 60% maybe?
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All I can say is.. Awesome!
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Even i hate spam but i know its not going to die..
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gwailo247 said:
If they just arrest four more guys we'll be free of spam.
How much would you wager that all four would be from either Russia or China XD
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Honestly spam is probably one of the worst problems with the internet today, you'd think that this kind of arrest would be more common!
The company I work for has a small mail server for a few 100 clients and we get literally millions of spam emails filtered out daily!
Hackers should step up and start breaking botnets as a claim to fame rather than hack the fbi or whatever.
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As George Jetson said, "My button pushing finger is gettting tired..." of deleting that spam.
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Timonius said:
83.21% of stats are pulled out of a hat. How do we know this is 20% of spam?
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I think the answer is to charge 1/10th of a cent or something small like that for an email to be sent. For the normal user, sending emails all year like normal would only cost at MOST $1 (unless you're a chain letter sender, in which case you need to pay, anyway), but for those servers that send billions of spam emails, it would start to cost big time. And if a server receives an email, but doesn't receive the "postage" with it, the email should just be dropped.
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The same way they trust Obama to fix health care!
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DjKraid said:
Very well done! -I don't get it why anyone wants to make "spam" mail and what's the point in it..?
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shame the bluefrog got pulled down, apparently it did have an effect...
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Charging for email? You know how utterly ridiculous that sounds? Not to mention impossible.
Also, the guy will either retire on some island somewhere, as he made millions already, or just continue in another country (or a different part of Russia). He conveniently "got away."
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One dude provided 20% of spam messages??!! Kudos on Russia for bringing him down. Not like it hurt me at all. Thank you gmail spam filter.
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It's good they're trying to do something about it but making it more of a crime or somehow charging the spammers seems like it would do something to help the problem. Ultimately they need to fix the email system to keep it from being so easy to fake addresses and send massive amounts of emails.
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I see this as progress on one front, but unfortunately someone else will just step up and fill that void. Spam will never go away. It's just like telemarketers, they prey on the old and weak minded.
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How about spam and eggs?
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Seriously? i guy stopped and 20%?...that`s uber!
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oh no! will miss him, will miss my daily hour of cleaning crap mails... or maybe not!
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