3 Indians among top spammers

Lax cyber laws encourage spammers to route operations through India

BANGALORE: They have made select-and-delete an involuntary reaction among net users by flooding e-mail inboxes with spam, offering weight-loss panacea or herbal viagra.  And with spam being a lucrative business across the globe, even Indians are entering the fray in a big way.

Spamhaus.org, a British non-profit organization  regarded as the most authoritative voice on spamming, features  three Indians among the world's worst spammers who together account for 80 per cent of the world's spam:  Somnath Bharti, Husein Gandhi and Daniel Mankani.

All three have several aliases, email ids, false addresses and phone numbers strewn across the net.  While DNA managed to trace Bharti in Delhi, all efforts to locate Gandhi and Mankani drew a blank.

Unlike the United States, India does not consider spamming to be illegal, making the country a haven for spammers, says cyber law expert Pavan Duggal. Notorious spammers like Alan Ralsky, Paul Aunger and Scott Richter route their operations through India.

While Bharti and Gandhi operate from India, Mankani appears to be based in Singapore or Malaysia. Bharti, whose photograph appears on Spamhaus, did  MSc from IIT Delhi in 1997. IIT's alumni association website gives his email id  that links him to a company called Madgen Solutions. Attempts to reach him through this email ID or the phone numbers  on the company's website reached a deadend.

But a call made to a cellphone number, which IIT Delhi authorities provided after going through alumni records, was answered by one Rajesh who described himself as Bharti's secretary. He denied Bharti was involved in any kind of spamming but refused to confirm or deny whether he runs Madgen.

According to Spamhaus, Bharti and his partner Paul Aunger run a large spam operation called Topsites.

`Rajesh' denies all this but brushes off all questions on how Bharti came to be listed by Spamhaus at all.

According to the site of Techpreneurship Singapore, Mankani launched PerPay for online financial transactions in 2001. He also launched a slew of companies in Singapor.

Gandhi  claims to be an MBA from a Mumbai institute. On elance.com, Gandhi advertises bulletproof hosting - a popular spamming tool - and claims to provide domain registrations from a server in Argentina. Somewhere along the line, he teamed up with Alan Ralsky.