Leo Kuvayev

Leo Kuvayev
Born	Leonid Aleksandrovitch Kuvayev 13 May 1972
Other names	Alex Rodrigez

Leonid Aleksandrovitch Kuvayev (born 13 May 1972), who usually goes by the name of Leo, is a Russian/American spammer believed to be the ringleader of one of the world's biggest spam gangs. In 2005, he and six business partners were fined $37 million as a result of a lawsuit brought by the Massachusetts attorney general. It was found that they were responsible for millions of unsolicited e-mails per day. According to Spamhaus he could be the "Pharmamaster" spammer who performed a denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against the BlueSecurity company. Kuvayev is also behind countless phishing and mule recruiting sites hosted on botnets.

Kuvayev originally started a company in Montreal, Quebec called 2k Services with his partner Vladislav Khokholkov (Vlad). 2K's business involved several ventures, a credit card processing company that specialized in membership systems (MemberPro) and online casinos (ecash services). These ventures were essentially a wrapper for his credit card processing system, paid search (2k Search), a Top List system (Top100), and a referral program (Cash For Clicks). When Vlad was deported back to Russia, the company moved some of its programming services there, to a site not far from Moscow.

His casino business made the bulk of its money by selling low priced software licenses to casino operators and then charging a minimum processing fee for each casino from the owner. The software was notoriously buggy and made several casino blacklists even before Kuvayev had the programmers in Russia implement "Odds Management" to raise the odds of winning on free games and lower the odds on the paid games.

The Top100 system was a way to create pages of rankings and made the bulk of its money from banner advertisements. In 2001, Vladislav worked out a way to recover from the loss of revenue caused by dropping market rates for banner ads by exploiting a bug in Internet Explorer that allowed a maliciously coded website to overwrite arbitrary files on the victim's hard drive. Vlad's programmers implemented code in top100 to overwrite C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc.\hosts with a version that redirected auto.search.msn.com to 2ksearch.com; this had the effect of redirecting all mistyped web addresses to 2ksearch. This business model was abandoned when the resulting complaints forced the paid search providers to terminate 2ksearch's contract.

...
Wikipedia