Alan Ralsky, an infamous spammer known throughout America, has been sentenced to more than four years of jail time because of his role in hatching a million-dollar stock fraud spam scheme that more or less earned him about two million and seven-hundred thousand U.S. dollars. The sixty-four-year-old spam kingpin from West Bloomfield (a place near Detroit, Michigan) was given fifty-one months of incarceration time while his co-conspirator son-in-law, the forty-eight-year-old Scott Bradley, was sentenced for forty months over the same inject-and-reject stock scam plot involving thinly traded stocks.

Both of the two criminals pleaded guilty to violations of the CAN-SPAM Act, money laundering, and wire fraud. Two other accomplices that came clean on their association with the scheme were sentenced on Monday yesterday. Five other collaborators will be given their sentences later on today, on Tuesday. The fifty-one-year-old How Wai John Hui (who is a resident of both Canada and Hong Kong) was given a sentence that's similar to the one Ralsky got, which is fifty-one months imprisonment for his close ties with the debacle. How even consented to surrender over five hundred thousand dollars' worth of his illegally obtained profits.

In turn, Bradley and Ralsky were each arranged to relinquish two hundred fifty thousand dollars that the U.S. government confiscated on December of 2007 during a Monday hearing conducted at the Michigan Court. Meanwhile, the forty-five-year-old John Brown (from Fresno, California) was sentenced to do thirty-two months of jail time because of his link to the spam swindle and was required to pay back about one hundred twenty thousand dollars in ill-gotten wealth.

At any rate, the spam scheme worked this way: First, the cyber criminals utilized spam email that was distributed across worldwide networks via a botnet of compromised computers to endorse and promote interest in fringe stocks (U.S. companies possessed and managed by people from Mainland China and Hong Kong) from January 2004 to September 2005.

The technique was specifically developed to cause an artificial rise in the price of these stocks; the scammers bought shares in the stocks that they afterwards sold during the spike period of synthetically engineered interest before the expected crash and burn afterwards. It was a frighteningly ingenious ploy that manipulated the rules of the stock market game.