I Kill Spammers

Welcome to my shiny new blog.

I have been posting on several antispam forums starting in around February or March of this year (2006). I have been pretty angry about the overall deterioration of the Internet at the hands of criminals for a few years. It came to a head last October of 2004 when I suddenly saw a 400% increase on one of my accounts. This is an email account I had posted precisely nowhere, given to nobody, and used specifically as a test account for my own development purposes. Somehow these assholes decided to start sending me "offers" for bullshit products and mortgage scams which I would never be interested in in the first place. They didn't care. They had a profit level to maintain.

I decided to start examining their websites, paying specific attention to their order forms. I started sending bait orders or leads. That got a pretty much instantaneous reaction. This was just me, small scale stuff, using manually entered fake details. After the first posting, my network started acting funny. I was being DDOS'd. I unplugged my ethernet and restarted my cable modem.

This surprised me. That a spammer could feel somehow threatened or throw a tantrum after only one measly fake: how old were these assholes anyway?! Ridiculous.

From that point on I've taken the mindset that I am dealing with three year olds. Baby wants bottle. Baby doesn't get bottle: baby throws tantrum. Wahhh. It's an effective analogy on so many levels, and in the years I've been doing this the idiots behind the most prevalent spamming operations have never proven that they think or act in any other way. Even the most sophisticated ones act like a bunch of stupid little brats.

So in February or March of this year, after finishing reading Spam Kings [spamkings.oreilly.com] by Brian McWilliams, I was made aware of an effort on a specific forum to go after one specific high-profile spammer: Alex Polyakov. I decided to join in. I brought a whole parcel of my own custom-written tools to this and other forums, and I noticed that people really, REALLY enjoyed running them. I compare it to that lab rat example where it can't stop pressing the button because it stimulates some portion of their brain everytime it gives them a treat. Button. Treat. Button. Treat. ButtonTreatButtonTreatButtonTreatButtonTreat... :) People ate it up. It's progressed since then.

The fuckhead spammers of course don't like that. So they've had to evolve the way their websites are built. Mortgage spammers now routinely ban an ip address after a measly single post. I guess they've never heard of anyone sharing their computer, or their network. They're clearly a bunch of braindead little morons. If certain pharmaceutical spammers start seeing me (wherever I am) snooping around their sites, they ban my ip address. That's ridiculous! I thought the whole point of spamming was to get people to come to your website in the first place?!

I'm going to attempt to maintain this blog and provide as much information as possible about these criminals, their background, their infrastructure and methods I've used to retaliate against them. My hope is that eventually you can do a search for a spammed website's product, and this site will be the first hit that you get. It shouldn't be that hard. Most of my postings on all the forums I've contributed to have become the top 3 link for most products out there (try one for "Spur-M spam" to see what I mean. The 4th hit on that list is one of my posts, or a posting about one of my utilities.)

I'll start by describing the main idiot I am gunning for (as are hundreds of others including international law enforcement): Alex Polyakov.

That's for my next post.

Thanx for reading.

IKS/SiL

P.S. Naturally since idiot spammers love to spam blog comments, it is highly likely that I will have to turn off comments at some point. Don't take it personally. Spammers are idiots and they like to ruin as many things as possible. This puny blog is no exception.