In Russland ist Spammen grundsätzlich nicht illegal. Besonders beliebt sind Spammer dort allerdings auch nicht, wie der Fall des Vardan Kushnir zeigt. Am Sonntag wurde er in seinem Moskauer Apartment mit zahlreichen Kopfschüssen Schlägen auf den Kopf getötet, wie die MOSnews berichten.
Kushnir war Manager des American Language Centers in Moskau, zu dem die Wikipedia unter anderem die folgenden Informationen gespeichert hat:
American Language Center was the most prominent and the most famous spammer in Russia around 2002-2003. As the name suggests, the company is a language center that taught American English, with the emphasis on verbal skills. The company is based in Moscow.
The company regularly and indiscriminantly sent astronomical amounts of spam to Russian Internet users, promoting the telephone numbers of its office. The company managed to successfully defeat anti-spam filtering for a long time by applying the latest tricks (garbled words to defeat filtering, text in image to defeat smart filtering, deformed images to defeat OCR). There is probably no spamming technique that wasn’t used, including spamming in media other than e-mail, such as forums, blogs, e-commerce sites, ICQ, etc.
Soon the company became universally hated and epitomized the growing problem of spam. Death threats and insults abound, the company continued its shady practices.
