Updates from Derren Brown and the Enigma Crew

Alan Ralsky, the so-called “Godfather of spam” was yesterday sentenced by a federal judge in Detroit to spend the next 51 months of his life in prison for wire fraud, mail fraud, and violations of the CAN-SPAM act.

Not content simply to move boxes of pills or to sign people up for new mortgages, Ralsky’s operation instead pulled in millions of dollars through “pump and dump” schemes of thinly traded stocks in companies you’ve never heard of. Millions of e-mails would announce some hot new “Internet IPO!!!!!” just about to drop, and—amazingly—some people would want in on the action.

This might not sound like a good way to get rich, but the government’s court documents showed just how lucrative the practice could be. Consider the list of following payments that arrived from Hong Kong in just one month, July 2005:

July 5: $180,826.61
July 11: $211,595.76
July 14: $13,532
July 22: $780,295.98
July 26: $65,590.71
July 27: $424,963.73
July 27: $23,702

A scheme like this required a certain amount of sophistication, and Ralsky appears to have run it like a real business. He was the chief executive, and his son-in-law, Scott Bradley, was the chief financial officer. John Bown, CEO of network administration company GDC Layer One, was the “chief technology officer and network systems manager” for the spammers.

Full story at ArsTechnica