Russian spammer killed

Quote,

Remember when the Internet was spam free? Every day you would sit down at your computer, dial into your ISP, open your email client, and wait several minutes while a few messages downloaded from your relatives and friends.

Then it happened. SPAM. Quickly it became the biggest online annoyance of it's time. Prior to popups and spyware, spam was the electronic equivilent of postal junk mail. And then it got so bad we had to start inventing ways to filter out the spam. And I'm sure most of us wished we could get back at that spammer - some of us may even have wished he/she were dead!

Well now it has happened. Vardan Kushnir of Moscow, Russia, was found in his apartment murdered by someone who finally got fed up. Vardan was known as the largest spammer in Russia, sending millions of unsolicited emails daily to advertise the services of the English learning centers he headed. Since Russia does not have any laws against such email, he considered it a perfectly okay commerical practice. Obviously someone else did not share his opinion.

More,

http://mosnews.com/news/2005/07/25/spammerdead.shtml


snowbound

 

I guess his days of spammin are over
I wont lose any sleep over dat

 

English School Director Killed

By Carl Schreck
Staff Writer
The director of an English-language center and one of the country's most notorious spammers was found beaten to death in his apartment in central Moscow, police said Monday.

Vardan Kushnir, a 35-year-old Russian national who ran the American Language Center, was found at about 12:50 a.m. Sunday in his apartment at 20 Sadovaya-Karetnaya Ulitsa, between the Mayakovskaya and Tsvetnoi Bulvar metro stations on the Garden Ring Road, city police spokesman Sergei Prudnikov said.

Kushnir had died about 35 minutes earlier of severe head injuries from an apparent beating, Prudnikov said. It was unclear who discovered the body.

City Prosecutor's Office spokesman Sergei Marchenko said the killer or killers had apparently rifled through Kushnir's possessions, leaving the apartment in disarray.

He and Prudnikov refused to comment on a possible motive for the slaying, citing an ongoing investigation.

A district prosecutor, Pyotr Titov, expressed hope that the case would be solved quickly.

"Right now, we need to thoroughly inspect the crime scene, gather the clues and figure out the possible suspects who could have committed the crime," Titov said on NTV television. "But currently, no one has been detained."


NTV said investigators would examine video footage captured by a security camera pointed at the courtyard of the building where Kushnir lived.

Moskovsky Komsomolets reported on its web site that Kushnir had been struck at least 10 times on the head with a blunt object. The newspaper said, without citing any sources, that a laptop computer, a digital camera, a regular camera, gold and cash had been stolen from the three-room apartment.

A woman who answered the telephone at the American Language Center declined to comment about the death.

Andrei Kashutin, the managing director of IT Dvizheniye, an industry association of nearly 7,000 IT students and young professionals, said Kushnir and his company were the most well-known spammers in Russia, sending millions of unsolicited e-mail messages offering English classes at the American Language Center.

"Anybody who regularly uses e-mail has come across their spam," Kashutin said.

He added, however, that it was highly unlikely that an angry e-mail user would actually kill him, "especially if it happened in his own apartment."

Several former American Language Center employees concurred.

"He had other business disputes and might have owed someone money. He had a lot of enemies," said one former employee who asked not to be identified because she did not want her name to appear in an article about the apparent murder of her former boss.

In July 2003, then-Deputy Communications Minister Andrei Korotkov, tired of a barrage of American Language Center e-mails, started a campaign to crack down on the spam. Korotkov, who oversaw the government's Electronic Russia initiative, replied to an e-mail with a request to be taken off the center's list. Instead, he received a flurry of spam messages from the center and decided to flood the center with unsolicited phone calls.

With help from Internet providers ROL and Rambler, he pelted the center with 1,000 automated phone calls in a single morning. Anyone who picked up the receiver at the center's office near Oktyabrskaya metro station that morning heard Korotkov give his name and position and say, "I want to warn you that if you continue your illegal activity, then the necessary measures will be taken not just by me."

A former teacher said Korotkov was not the only person who complained. "We would get about 60 calls a day," said the former teacher, who also did not want his name to appear in an article about the death.

"The phone never stopped ringing," he said. "You wouldn't say they were just angry. They were furious."

The female former employee said she thought it was a joke when she first heard that Kushnir had been killed because people have posted notices about his death on the Internet in the past. "I have seen at least three rumors on the Internet that he had been killed, but those were just hoaxes," she said.

Kushnir's death was met with widespread cynicism on Russian Internet forums Monday, with one post on Securitylab.ru suggesting it "looks like the next method to draw attention to the company in question."

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2005/07/26/003.html

Read more here about his life..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Language_Center

 

Should qualify for a MVP award... Likewise for the coolwebsearch bullshit!

 

I could not have said it better when it comes to reaction to this news....let's Please keep things in perspective.

 

The theory presented that he was wasted because of his spamming in not even credible news

 

Spamers are a pain and an annoyance but do not deserve to be killed.

The swines who hide premium rate dialers in the Activex on websites is a different story all together, they should be hung drawn and quatered in my opinion.

 

I fail to feel any jubilation or elation over his death, sure, spamming is a plague that deserves a suitable punishment, but to be beaten to death seems unnecessary. Just my opinion (and on one of my 'sensible' days)


Kev

 

I agree, it would have been better had he been convicted an spent a few years in an old style gulag. Death penalty does seem a little harsh.

Thanks
Wildman

 

Quoted from a page that discussed the above, also mentioned this,

In terms of more even-handed justice being meted out to spammers, a group of 310 individuals involved in committing Nigerian 419 scams was arrested late last week in Spain.

Spanish police and the FBI arrested the Nigerian gangsters, who are believed to have raised around €100m from bogus email scams involving fake lotteries as well as from the trademarks scams which claim to be offering a large sum of money in need of laundering from a corrupt government or dishonest bank.


snowbound

 

If we haven't any laws against the Spam, we have to leave with this until they came, but kill someone because of this is really sad and stupid...

 

lucky me I have a built in spam filter in my hotmail