American Language Center

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American Language Center was a prominent and infamous Moscow-based spammer around 2002-2003. The company was a language center that taught American English, with the emphasis on verbal skills. It was owned by a businessman of Armenian descent, Vardan Kushnir, until his 2005 murder. The company used other shady business practices, such as avoiding taxes through unregistered cash payments. Kushnir was also involved in a stock scam in the United States and was sued in Florida in 2001.

The company regularly and indiscriminately sent astronomical amounts of spam to Russian Internet users, promoting the telephone numbers of its office. The numbers were "(095) 238-33-86", "(095) 778-98-94", "(095) 411-02-32", and "(095) 778-98-32". The company managed to successfully defeat anti-spam filtering for a long time by applying such techniques as garbled words to defeat filtering, text in image to defeat smart filtering, and deformed images to defeat OCR. It sent spam by media other than e-mail, such as forums, blogs, e-commerce sites, ICQ, etc.

The company quickly became universally hated and epitomized the growing problem of spam. Despite death threats and insults, the company continued its practices. The company's website was repeatedly driven offline by DDOS and hacking attacks. As Russian ISPs were willing to close sites advertised by spam, it was risky to promote its website via spam. Therefore the company generally limited its contacts with the potential customers to phone.

A number of hate sites and forum threats were started where disgruntled Internet users discussed what they would like to do to the ALC, its owner and employees. Messages such as "When you go to Moscow, please call 238-33-86 and say "f**k you" on my regard" became common on regional message boards and foreign forums of Russian expatriates. In an attempt to retaliate using an offline DDOS attack, Internet users started posting the phone numbers at dating sites or on bulletin boards– for example, pretending to sell a good car for below market price.

The users also participated in phone DDOS campaigns themselves, with thousands of angry calls on one day. An online magazine encouraged its readers to call on April 17, 2003 and pretend to sign up for the courses or request extensive information [1]. The Russian Deputy Minister of Communications Andrey Korotkov's use of the infrastructure of Russia's largest ISP to send an angry message to ALC phone numbers every 10 seconds. In November 2003 after a complaint from a lawyer Anton Sergo, Russian Anti-Monopoly Committee (MAP) investigated the advertising practices of ALC. All requests to ALC for additional information were ignored and attempts to contact Kushnir failed. After trying for six months, MAP sued ALC. Soon after that Kushnir responded and claimed that he didn't receive any requests for information and his company did not send out e-mail advertising and suggested that spam could have been sent by a competitor. This concluded the unsuccessful attempt to fight ALC legally.

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