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Tech

Chat Logs From The Internet's 24-Year-Old "King of Spam"

He’s called “the King of Spam” among members of the internet’s seedy underground, and now he’s been caught by authorities.
Janus Rose
New York, US
Illustration: Reynaldo Hernandez/AP

Apart from the networks of infected computers and poorly-translated emails offering shady pharmaceutical drugs, the inner workings of the shadowy criminal empires that deal in Internet spam remain a mystery. Every once in a while though, we match a face to junkmail. He's called "the King of Spam" among members of the internet's seedy underground, and now he's been caught by authorities — 24 year old Oleg Nikolaenko, aka "Docent," is the alleged owner of the "Mega-D" botnet, an enormous web of zombie-computers that collectively sends around 10 billion spam messages per day.

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What's more, they've found chat logs of his conversations with clients, which include sketchy pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers of counterfeit goods and spam affiliate networks representing all of the above. According to the released logs, an average chat between spam dealers goes down something like this:

**

Stupin (co-administrator of the spam network SpamIt): ок) What kind of volumes of spam can you deliver? We are soon deploying our own "partnerka" for spam, we just do not have it right now.

Docent: Volumes are huge, 500 million + / day.

Stupin: Wow! Are you not accidentally on [Spamhaus] ROKSO List ?

Docent: Yes, it's a list of idiots , with the exception of a couple of people.

Stupin: We do contract people for our spam campaigns, but only verified people. We are not publicly opened yet.

Docent: I know someone who personally knows Desp [the nickname used by Stupin's partner and SpamIt co-founder Igor Gusev]. And also we can collect references

Docent: Does your program accept Visa?

Stupin: Yes. Not only Visa. It would be fantastic if you provide your recommendations. I will honestly depict our situation, we will not be able to sustain your volume of spam in addition our current traffic. We can try to work with you in China or with new hosting platform, however hosts there are not tested. If you are ok with that, I will send you several domains.

Docent: In any case, I will not switch the entire volume for you.

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Docent: Regarding my Visa question… I actually meant MasterCard.

Stupin: We have MasterCard. We'll definitely not sustain the entire volume, we can try little-by-little, checking each other out.

**

For a botnet owner, the transaction involves switching over portions of his network to send messages from individual clients, hence the refusal above to "switch the entire volume" for SpamIt. The FBI has uncovered hundreds of hours of chats regarding deals such as this, which earn spam masters like Docent upwards of $325,000 over a small handful of years. And that speaks of nothing of what he gets from his other clients.

Obviously when you've got a botnet this massive (estimated at half a million infected machines) you're going to be the one calling the shots. The full transcript shows a drama which unfolds over a period of months, with Docent eventually bartering up to almost 50% revenue share.

There's also a decent amount of talk about the various drugs being peddled:

**

Stupin: I have bad news – we will have to turn off controlled, someone got arrested there, everything is getting turned off there(

Docent: Where has someone got arrested?

Stupin: Some supplier. Many Russians were sending via him.

Docent: Where do you ship from?

Stupin: From India, like everyone else.

Docent: It is strange that someone has got arrested in India.

Stupin: Well this one was tremendously illegal

Stupin: Only heroin is worse)

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Docent: Not for India…

Docent: Is xanax illegal ?

Stupin: Yes

Docent: Vicodin is worse. Xanax is not very illegal.

Stupin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanax Legal status Schedule IV(US)

Docent: ))) Well, aaccording to US laws even spam can lead to 1000 years of imprisonment.

Stupin: Only schedule V is worse.

Docent: Especially is large volumes ). And from bots.

Stupin: Vicodin – It is in Section III.

Docent: But nobody is selling it. because people can get really high from it. But nobody can get high from xanax. All generic are selling it.

**

Security researcher Brian Krebs has posted more transcripts here.

Connections:

Kicking Botnet & Taking Names: What It Takes To Eliminate The Biggest Spam Networks
To Sell $100 Worth of Viagra, a Spammer Needs to Send 12.5 Million Messages
To Destroy Spam Forever, Scientists Bought A Lot of Viagara