Fan Mail for the Spam King?

Now I Know, as you know, is an email newsletter. And since its founding in 2010, it’s struggled with something that all email newsletters struggle with: spam filters. While this newsletter is — clearly, I hope! — not spam, it is a write-once, send-to-thousands endeavor. So I have to dodge spam filters and the like, which is frustrating because this newsletter is only good if it reaches your inbox.

This is a problem because other, less scrupulous people abuse the ability to send email. It’s very easy to send junk email at scale, and usually, those of us on the receiving end of such junk are powerless to do anything other than hit the delete key and hope for the best.

But in 2002, a bunch of regular people struck back.

Most spammers keep their identity anonymous as best they can. But in the earlier days of the consumer Internet, a spammer named Alan Ralsky wasn’t so coy about his avocation. Rather, he saw himself as a riches-to-rags-to-riches story worth following. In August of 2002, sat down with the Detroit News for an interview — sharing what life was like for a professional spammer. Ralsky recounted how worked in the insurance industry from 1976 to 1988, earning $500,000 or more a year at his peak. But that didn’t last, and Ralsky ended up declaring bankruptcy in the early 1990s and was convicted of falsifying bank documents. By 1996, he was not only broke, but he lost his insurance license and had no obvious career path ahead of him. But that changed when he sold his car and bought himself a pair of computers. He used those computers and his home Internet connection to start a career as a “commercial emailer” — he objected to the “spammer” label.

Ralsky’s profile — and success — caught the eye of others in Detroit’s press circles. And when he bought a house for $740,000 a month after that profile came out, at least one other reporter wanted to write about that, too. That November, Mike Wendland, a columnist for the Detroit Free Press, shared the story of Ralsky’s new house: a “brand new 8,000-square-foot luxury home near Halsted and Maple in West Bloomfield” that was going to feature “an array of 20 different computers — the control center of what many believe is the largest single bulk e-mailing operation in the world.” Ralsky, however, realized that this probably wasn’t something one wants too much attention over (spammers aren’t well-liked, after all), so he tried to have his cake and eat it, too. Wendland explained: “Ralsky says he is trying to keep a lower profile, operating through cell phones and unlisted numbers. Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records.”

That second instinct was correct. Slashdot, a community of early Internet-philes, caught wind of this interview and Ralsky’s self-aware need to hide his address, and quickly got to work to locate the spammer’s home. One commenter, a law student, was able to do a public records search and located Ralsky’s address. And after that, the rest of the community — and others — took over. In a follow-up article, Wendland explained:

West Bloomfield bulk e-mailer Alan Ralsky, who just may be the world’s biggest sender of Internet spam, is getting a taste of his own medicine.

Ever since I wrote a story on him a couple of weeks ago, he says he’s been inundated with ads, catalogs and brochures delivered by the U.S. Postal Service to his brand-new $740,000 home.

It’s all the result of a well-organized campaign by the anti-spam community, and Ralsky doesn’t find it funny.

“They’ve signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is,” he told me. “These people are out of their minds. They’re harassing me.”

Ralsky — who had previously argued that his bulk emailing was protected speech under the First Amendment — threatened legal action against the bulk mailers (the irony was, apparently, lost on him), but never appeared to have followed through. But in the end, someone did in fact get in trouble with the law: Ralsky himself. As the Department of Justice announced in 2009, Ralsky wasn’t just spamming: he was committing fraud, “running an international spamming operation that sent billions of illegal e-mail advertisements to pump up Chinese ‘penny’ stocks and then reap profits by causing trades in these same stocks while others bought at the inflated prices. He was sentenced to four years and three months in prison. On the plus side, he couldn’t receive any access to ads, catalogs, and brochures while in lockup.

Bonus fact: Spam doesn’t go well with pizza, as pizza chain Papa John’s learned in 2013. Three years earlier, Papa John’s began sending unsolicited bulk text messages to customers, reaching some would-be eaters in the middle of the night when they were sleeping and definitely not looking for some pizza. Unfortunately for the pizza giant, this marketing campaign probably ran afoul of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which allows recipients of such texts to “sue for up to $500 for each violation.” Papa John’s found themselves on the wrong end of a class action suit as a result, and in June of 2013, settled the claim for $16.5 million. The lawyers who litigated the case got their fees; the people who received the text were entitled to $50 and a free pizza, according to PizzaMarketplace.com.

From the Archives: A Boy Named Sue: Check out the bonus fact on that one.