It seems that today someone invented a new way of fighting spam. The idea is simple—scare spammers to death by circulating a hoax that one of their ilk has just been murdered! It would not take long for people to conclude that such a poor fate might be related to the professional activities of the deceased. The following blog appeared today on one of the anonymous sites and immediately got wide attention:
To reinforce the story they even included a reference to a real story back from 2005 when the most prolific Russian spammer—Vardan Kushnir—was killed in Moscow. There is a big “but” here though. The widespread belief that the murder of Vardan Kushnir in July 2005 was related to spam distribution collapsed after the real killers were detained one month later. It’s ironic, though perhaps typical of how media works, that unfounded speculations received much wider publicity than the facts that became available once the murder case was closed.
As much as we at McAfee Avert Labs would like to reduce the level of spam, we just have to conclude that spammers can still sleep well at night. 
October 11th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Are you arguing that the death did not occur at all, or that it was unrelated to his spamming? Regardless, it seems that spamming is a shady business, and people in shady businesses sometimes run afoul of people in a world where normal rules often don’t apply. I wouldn’t be so quick to say that spamming is free of that type of danger.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
The spammers can sleep as well as the drug dealers and child abusers can. They all prey on the weak for their own gain. I personally would not mind employing some SpamAssasin of my own sometimes.
October 12th, 2007 at 12:08 am
You could be right; but still, there is no proof for this proposal, you’re just speculating.
I guess we’ll have to wait and find out whether someone really died, and whether they were killed because of spam, and not because of a “usual” money-related dispute.
October 12th, 2007 at 5:43 am
The Sunbelt blog claims this was a hoax See “SunbeltBLOG: Hoax? Is Alexey Tolstokozhev, spammer, dead?”
http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/alexey-tolstokozhev-spammer-dead.html which includes a link to this story: “taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog » ‘Dead spammer’ story a hoax”
http://taint.org/2007/10/11/203243a.html