Most people won’t recognize the name Oleg Y. Nikolaenko, who pleaded not guilty in a U.S. court in Wisconsin on Friday to running an international spamming organization, but odds are that anyone with an e-mail account has run across his handiwork. Officials say that a network masterminded by the 23-year-old Russian may have sent up to 10 billion messages in a 24-hour period. If true, his operation accounted for one of every three unwanted e-mails in the world on those days.
Nikolaenko was charged with violating the Can-Spam act by intentionally falsifying header information in commercial e-mail messages and sending at least 2,500 spam e-mails per day. That’s the minimum number to sustain the charge, though prosecutors clearly believe many more were sent. Whatever the number, the effort to reduce unwanted spam is welcome.
If convicted, Nikolaenko could spend three years in prison and pay a $250,000 fine. If convicted, that seems a fairly minimal price to pay for the financial loses sustained by unsuspecting individuals who responded to missives offering fake watches and prescription drugs, among other items, and who got bogus products or nothing in return.
Bringing Nikolaenko to justice was not easy. Federal officials say they were put on his trail following the prosecution of a Missouri man for conspiring to traffic in counterfeit Rolex watches. Details in that case eventually led them to the Moscow man and thence to Mega-D, a sophisticated worldwide spamming network that is as fascinating as it is malicious.
Mega-D, federal investigators say, was a “robot network” or botnet, in which unsuspecting users’ computers are infected with so-called malware which allows someone to remotely hijack the computer and have it send out spam e-mails. The Mega-D network, officials say, included more than half a million infected computers. By any measure, its operation constituted a major crime.