Alan Ralsky (
a.k.a. Al Ralsky) is a U.S. businessman who despite having had some
troubles with the law earlier in his life now makes
quite a decent living producing and dispatching
unsolicited marketing emails. To you and I, that would be
spam. Alan Ralsky is not really worth anyone's notice, even, save for the amazingly humorous (well, okay, to me at least) story recently posted to various websites. Ralsky had given an interview which was posted on freep.com, related to a previous week's story on spamming in the
Wall Street Journal. The problem was (is) that Ralsky is apparently
not very bright at all, and in addition to allowing the use of his
real name provided more than enough information for an enterprising
netizen (or a few hundred) to find his home address through openly available internet information sources (
assessor's data,
yahoo people, etc.). This information was then
posted widely.
A couple of weeks later, slashdot is running a 'follow-up' story which contains pointers to Ralsky fuming about all the 'harrassment' he's received, in the form of 'these people signing me up for every commercial offer in the world' and 'sending me loads of junk.' Best of all, he then describes his lawyer, who he has retained to 'sue them all...' ...and 'outs' his lawyer as well.
The end of the story is not yet written.
2010 Update: avalyn reminds me that in fact there is, now, more of the story; he notes that "Ralsky and several cohorts were sent to federal...prison, with Ralsky himself getting five years."