Delaney Brown - Analysis of an Online Crime



Article Title: “Viagra spam industry earns Russian crime gangs tens of millions a year”

Link: http://www.realscam.com/f16/viagra-spam-industry-earns-russian-crime-gangs-tens-millions-year-2604/

This summer, Russian prosecutors linked four Russian men: Igor A. Amrtimovich, Paul Vrublevsky, Dimitri Amrtimovich, and Maxim Permakov to a multimillion dollar Viagra-spam industry that is persistently infecting computers around the world today.  This spam-bot program, most likely created by Artimovich, preys upon computers with weak virus protection and sends them multiple invitations to purchase counterfeit male enhancement products.  The owner usually cannot trace where the spam came from nor do they know that their entire computer is being compromised.  Spamming has been a source of revenue (about 60 million a year) for Russian criminal gangs.  For the longest time, Russian officials would not made the attempt to convict spamming specialists because their efforts tend to affect Americans the most.  When the same spamming companies started flooding Russian websites with activity and eventually shutting them down, officials finally took interest into the problem.  Three of the men have denied the charges with the claim that their computers contained planted evidence while Permakov admitted to his involvement in exchange for a suspended sentence.

This case is an example of John Suler’s concept of “Dissociative Anonymity” because these four Russian spammers never had to give away their identity (and used this as an incredible advantage) as they were scamming people all over the world.  As victims were opening up invitations to purchase “Viagra”, there was almost no way that they could track down the spam origins.  Additionally, the Russian spammers’ actions could not be completely linked to their everyday lives.  They could convince themselves that the action of selling and spamming fake Viagra isn’t a part of their real life self at all.  This might be why most of the convicted men were so quick to state that they are being framed with forged evidence.  They might not be able to process that their Internet lives are directly related to what happens in their real world.