One way to 'beat' spammers

[0iD]

http://www.silicon.com/research/spec...9150764,00.htm

Known spammer Vardan Kushnir has been found dead in his Moscow apartment, having apparently been beaten to death about the head.

Beating spam....with a large blunt object.

[Dougal]

Whats the betting it was a computer they used as the object?

I'm reckoning on a Dell.

[shiato storm]

well they're not much good for anything else now are they?!

[XA04]

It's awful to hear about people been murdered and such, but this made me smile.. is something wrong with me?

[shiato storm]

no, its aweful to hear about innocent people bein gmurderd and killed. this guy got what was coming

[Spunkey]

In July 2003, Russia's deputy communications minister, Andrei Korotkov, became so incensed about the volumes of spam he was receiving he instigated a denial of service attack against the school's phone system.

LOL he was that much of a spammer the government DOS'd him

[0iD]

Who said the KGB was out of action!

[Twigman]

Haha...I was in Russia at the time. *cough*

MOSCOW — 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 Sadovo-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 spokes-man 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 identify possible suspects who could have committed the crime,” Titov said on NTV television. “But currently no one has been detained.”

NTV said investigators will 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 Dvizhenia, 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.