Most of the regulars will know this guy!

Federal authorities are accusing a Seattle man of not only sending out millions of spam messages himself, but selling the software for others to do the same and stealing unique e-mail addresses and domain names to further his operation.

Complete story here:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com:80/local/317795_soloway31.html

Yes, indeedy! Hopefully he'll get a long, Federally-financed retirement.

No doubt in court he will drag out his old card that he contributes bulk-mail services to charities, although this might not work as well in criminal court (if it ever did in civil court).

He should also be sure to inform the court of his prize winning efforts (which I document [on my website].

-- rick

Heh,

If they put him away this time (and don't allow him computer access from the penitentiary) I guess SpamHaus will be able to recycle a platter or two (for those who haven't been there before, use the internal links within the lead item and also use the SH dropdown menu to explore the extent of the accumulated evidence/sightings/comments). Why did it take so long?

[added - the SpamHaus link: first time visitors may taken to another page and asked to agree to accept cookies (depending on the cookie policy set up for the browser). If accepting, it may be necessary to return to this page to pick up the link again. Well, there's clean, then there's squeeky clean. I think this cookie query is new to SpamHaus, I'm sure I've visited before with this browser, same policies, and not been queried].

For those interested, PDFs of Soloway's indictment and pre-trial detention order are posted at http://www.mortgagespam.com/soloway/. 35 counts total, including mail fraud, wire fraud, identity theft, and the like.

I see there's a shipping bill indicating that Mr. Soloway shipped one of his famous CDs to one of my neighbors (not next door, but in the same small town).

-- rick

I hope they lose the key after locking this guy in.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070531/ap_on_hi_te/spam_arrest



It'd be truly interesting to see the decrease...

I have not received a single piece of spam since the arrest. Normally by this time I would have accumulated five to ten pieces of wonderful spam. This is the first drop off in spam that I have seen in 2 years despite my active participation in Spam Cop and other websites that fight spam.

Glad you are. My SpamCop account is still receiving the same numbers.

Spam numbers hitting my home account shot up about a week ago, still up, maybe increasing. At work, it fell away a couple of days ago, hasn't bounced back ... yet (I have every confidence it will, spam abhors a vacuum).

I don't see any drop in the amount of spam. If anything there was an increase!

http://www.spamcop.net/spamgraph.shtml?spamstats

For whatever reason, I never got much of Soloway's spam as far as I can tell. On the other hand, if the Feds could find a way to drag Leo & Alex & the rest of the Yambo/BadCow people into court, I'd probably drop down to near zero.

Given the current state of play between Putin and the English-speaking world, I'm not holding my breath on this.

-- rick

Heh, I don't think many of them actually live in Russia do they? Justice is a little variable there, rich men are a little too much of a target there, hard currency is a little scarce there - so I've heard. What has any of them to fear from the US justice system anyway? How many years and how much evidence to get Solway to the indictment stage? That's the cost of blind, impartial justice (worth paying in general IMO, mind you - the alternative only looks good when you're on the "right" side of it and, if rightness has nothing necessarily to do with innocence or guilt, I figure it could ruin one's day real quick).

The general chat around the internet indicates "don't expect much change". An explanation of the incidental/co-incidental surges in spam numbers is presented at: There aren’t that many serious spammers any more which I saw referenced in a GRC newsgoup (by user Kevin A.)

I don't know about the rest of you, but after a few days (probably took that long for all the zombie queues to clear out), I have noticed a very large decrease in spam received accross the board on all my accounts. Hopefully it will take a while before a new spammer steps up to fill the gap, the reprieve is nice.

Postini's public stats show no decrease yet. http://www.postini.com/stats/index.php

While my new company uses Postini, in my position, I do not yet have access to the specific stats for us like I did with my last position.

I'm seeing exactly the same on my two spammed accounts, two totally different spam "streams" each has dropped to the extent I have been getting more ham than spam. Not such big numbers to start with, even so - almost unprecedented. Don't know what to make of it all, not apparently anything directly to do with Soloway sleepless in Seattle. I trust they'll be back. As observed elsewhere, total volumes are evidently unaffected.

Maybe the Soloway issue has made all the spammers in the world realize what they were doing was wrong and they put down their keyboards


HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa

Eeyup. The intimation that nigh on a decade of unrelenting and open spamming will inevitably throw them into the arms of a passel of lawyers dedicated to getting them back on the streets as soon as possible with no tort unturned in the quest to counterclaim, no appeal too improbable to reiterate the principle that liberty and the unimpeded pursuit of profit is the inalienable right of every taxpayer and no dollar so dirty it is not worth 1/13.6800 troy ounces of silver (live rate at 2007.06.07 02:35:03 UTC, YMMV). That would do the trick, fo' sure. What was I thinking? (more maniacal laughter).

I am reminded of all those Frankenstein movies -- you know, the old doctor gets killed by his creation or burned up in his castle, so he's gone, but -- wait a minit -- here comes his son back to the ancestral ruins, where he finds all the old notes and apparatus, and -- presto! -- another monster walks the earth.

I may be a pessimist, but I can't imagine that whatever resources, networks, personal connections, etc. someone like Soloway has managed to amass over the years will suddenly evaporate should he go to the Big House.

-- rick

.... that's a real 'knee-slapper' fer sher.

RAS was slated to have his hearing on Monday last. I've been doing the rounds of the usual sources for info as to how this went, but haven't seen anything. I'd be interested to know if his bail is still denied and if he is still in Federal detention.

Haven't heard about that Rod.

Hm - 'bout that drop in spam, I wonder if ... As of the evening of June 7, anti-spam groups Spamhaus, SURBL (Spam URI Realtime Blocklists), URIBL (Realtime URI Blacklist) and others have been under a "pretty big" DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, according to the ISC (Internet Storm Center), which is run by the SANS Institute (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security). - Anti-Spam Orgs Under DDoS Siege. I guess no cause - effect link, it started a little later than the commented upon drops. I guess "they" have plenty of spare 'bots. Besides, amongst the "missing" spam there are one or two instances of mainsleeze, not part of the botnet scene at all.

But interesting, none the less. Well, that is if you have nothing better to think about ...

Steve;

Mayhap all Seattle's court reporters are in LA covering Paris Hilton; once again confirming my suspicion that ACME operates under the conviction that America's appetite for crap is virtually insatiable; ...whereas spam ... not so much.

Apropos spam loads: mine dropped from 30.2 per day (total for 3 email accounts) to 12.0 for 4 days, then bounced back to 25.6 per day. I don't attribute much significance to this --- just a blip that could be caused by anything.

Rod,
Unfortunately, it is not just America. Take the local "Big Brother" (please) - boyfriend of one of the housemates begging the public to vote his beloved out so family can finally tell her, 3 weeks after the event, that her Dad has died! Dunno what happened, don't watch it, but the brouhaha surrounding even the smallest and most inconsequencial part of this show is inescapable. I believe it is made in Queensland which would explain much.

As for the Hilton Heir(ess), I have found her to be of great utility as I have become accustomed to swearing great oaths by a prominent portion of her anatomy (not her nose).Yes, I suspect several things happened at once, one being some providers filtering like crazy and dropping many messages. My accounts are nowhere near back to "normal" (and it is the same provider for both).

Finally, some GOOD NEWS!

Merging this into the existing thread.

Not sure what might have happened, but .. I did the merge just now.

Sorry. Work interfered and I never did return to the forums.

Spam suspect denied bail Judge finds Seattle man could pose flight risk if freed before trial.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Warma convinced U.S. Magistrate Judge James Donohoe that Soloway poses a serious risk of jumping bail because he likely has large amounts of cash stashed in secret accounts.

"We don't know where his money is -- he made a lot of it," Warma told the judge.

Defense attorney Richard Troberman disagreed.

"He is cash-poor," the lawyer said. "What he owns is a lot of clothes."

Then how is he gunna pay you, Mr Troberman?

Ta Steve;

The alert must have hit my inbox about the same time as yours. I would have checked my other messages and replied to this thread, but I was busy cantering up and down the street in my skivvies, ivy wreath on my head, strawing flower petals and chortling:


It took the missus a couple of hours to post my bail.

with a stunt like that I tought she might have picked you in a hospital ward....

Clearly Rod's good lady wife is a paragon of all the virtues and accustomed to suffering.

Right you are. She ain't 'purty' or nuthin'; but she still has all her teeth and she scrubs up well.

You lucky devil.

Indeedy;

It was a tough choice between her and Minnie Bannister, but the missus was irresistible
by lamplite in her moose-hide body stocking and I was compelled to bid Rhythm Min a fond "Sailors' Farewell".

...but back on point... mayhap there is some room for cautions optimism that the Feds
are getting a bit of a handle on the bot-net problem.

http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel07/botnet061307.htm

The court documentation for denial of bail is now available. Makes for interesting reading.

Just as an update to my observation, I am still noticing MUCH lower than normal spam rates across the board (my Yahoo account, and the aggregate statistics from the spam filters on my mailserver at work and at home).

There are some folks conjecturing that some of the Botnets that sent spam last month are now all wrapped up in being part of the DDoS going on against numerous anti-spam sites and services.

Can't tell from "a sample of one" but that sort of fits in with what I am seeing on one of my accounts - virtually the only spam I have seen in the past 96 hours are totally lame "new kid" verification things like http://www.spamcop.net/sc?id=z13272292...;action=display (he doesn't quite get the hang of bcc ). My other account is "routine" but distinctly subdued, maybe 25% of "normal" volumes.

Need to change it to http://www.spamcop.net/sc?id=z1327229259z4...;action=display for non members

Thanks Merlyn, done in post & quote too ... my head must have been elsewhere, which is a bit of a worry.

Rather than expend valuable SC bandwidth, I entered a suggestion on a 'blog' about the possible entertainment value of keeping in touch with Mr. Soloway during his dalliance among the friendly folk at Seatac... if anyone is interested.

http://boundarybaymorningsteamer.blogspot....enge-of_16.html

Thank you Rod. Not the same since they stopped using the stocks for reasons of public hygiene but that may suffice.

GSS

Update on:That being my work address for which the numbers crept up in the last week and then back to "normal" or more over the weekend (Fri night - Mon morning). Not many but the average for the (almost) 7 months since the logging for the Abuse! reporter started is 6.9 pd and the weekend produced 9.5 pd. That may be a significant change (without actually crunching the numbers). The home account (SC reporting) remains "depressed". More real mail than spam for weeks (a month) now. Which is certainly not depressing.

Hmm... wildcards are useable in the Excel spreadsheet COUNTIF() function - only just stumbled across that (thinking it would be nice if it were so, and behold ...). Like =COUNTIF(A1:A10058,"="&B10061&"*") where B10061 contains the common start of a string expression of variable length, found in one row only of each record, records comprising a (potentially) variable number of rows.

Well, I've said it before, myself - if your spam levels have dropped it probably means your provider is filtering like mad (and dropping the detritus). Got around to delving into my home account settings last night, found anti-spam filtering is in place, enabled by default (Symantec Brightmail) with delete by default. Toggled to "label " instead of "delete" and in a 12 hour period when I have lately getting 4-5 spam I received 71.

I guess my provider told me they were doing all of this, sometime. But not around the time of the sudden reduction. Anyway, all those dear little spammers are still out there, still lusting after my riches , my address permanently engraved in their magic lists, it seems. Reassuring, in a way. Saw the visiting Egyptian Antiquities exhibition on loan from the Louvre on the weekend. Those people went to a lot of trouble for their "immortality". Mine came free, merely by having an email address.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/346878_spamking11.html .... January 10, 2008 8:34 p.m. PT

Four more charges against 'Spam King'
Seattle man now faces 40 counts of cybercrimes

A Seattle man dubbed the "Spam King" for allegedly using stolen e-mail addresses and "zombie" computers to send massive amounts of spam was arraigned Thursday on four more criminal charges.

The new charges -- aggravated identity theft, mail fraud and two counts of willful failure to file income tax -- boost the number of federal charges Robert Soloway faces to 40.

Soloway, 27, has pleaded not guilty to all counts.
.......
Investigators say Soloway used a controversial software called Dark Mailer, which allows users to tap into a network of proxy computers to send bulk e-mails with near-total anonymity. Investigators believe Soloway made more than $1 million over four years by sending millions of pieces of spam.

Court documents say Soloway, long reviled by international anti-spam groups, sent more than 90 million e-mails in three months through just two of the servers he used.

Soloway remains free on bond pending trial in March.

Throwing the kitchen sink...yeah, I like it. Should keep his lawyers on the job for quite a while come spring.

-- rick

I was looking through Soloway's case file on spamsuite.com and found this tidbit in Soloway's (apparently unsuccessful) response to the motion for detention (http://www.spamsuite.com/node/140):
Don't know about the Tourette's, but I can well imagine the anxiety and depression at work here.

-- rick

Hey, that's interesting - implying most/nearly all spammers are carrying out "Aggravated ID theft". Maybe we should be filing all spam (or representative samples) which forges our respective addresses JIC it might be proferred as evidence against other scum in future cases. If the seattlepi reporter has got the story right.

I was reading the comments about him posted on one of the local seattle boards..
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/346878_spamking11.html

People actually sound sorry for him, and feel he is being persecuted... How do people who obviously don't own a computer or use email get on to sites to post comments? Are these all comments from crack heads at the local library in Seattle?

"This is a classic case of finding someone whose behavior is villanous and misusing statutes to overcharge him."

"What do people have against entrepreneurs? "

Those are the comments of the three people in the known universe who don't want to lynch the little bugger - or maybe they're all just his mother using different (pseudo)nyms, a more believable proposition. If that woman had only kept her legs crossed ... still, there will be more to take his place and we can't blame their progenitors.