14 DAY TRIAL // Moscow police is investigating a man believed to be the mastermind behind the Spamit rogue pharmacy affiliate program, which closed down at the beginning of this month.
"Because of the numerous negative events happened last year and the risen attention to our affiliate program we’ve decided to stop accepting the traffic from 1.10.2010," read an announcement posted on Spamit.com on around September 25.
According to the New York Times, the program's demise was likely caused by a criminal investigation launched on September 21 by Russian authorities.
The probe targeted the activities of Igor A. Gustev, 31, of Moscow, long believed to be the main person behind Spamit, even though he repeatedly denied it.
According to officers from the the economic crime division of the Moscow police, Mr. Gustev is being accused of operating an unlicensed pharmacy and not registering a business.
The authorities executed a search warrant on his apartment yesterday, from where they seized hard disk drives, flash memory cards and laptops.
The equipment was taken for analysis and depending on what it contains, additional charges might be filed against the suspected spammer.
The police believes that Mr. Gustev might have already left the country and he denied any connection to Spamit.com or spam in general through he lawyer.
Spamit was the world's biggest spam affiliate program, which paid botnet masters to send billions of emails promoting rogue online pharmacies every day, including the notorious Canadian Pharmacy.
The Spamhaus Project, a volunteer anti-spam organization, places the Canadian Pharmacy gang at the top of its "World's Worst Spammers" list.
"Probably based in Eastern Europe, Ukraine/Russia. Host spammed web sites on botnets and on bulletproof Chinese web hosting," Spamhaus writes in its description of the operation.
Following the shutdown of Spamit at the beginning of October, security companies reported significant drops in the spam output of some large botnets.
M86 Security estimated that the overall spam traffic dropped by almost 40%, while McAfee released a more conservative number of 27%.