Spammer punished

last updated 8 January 2015

Moscow

Russian newspapers reacted with glee this week when the country’s most prolific spammer was bludgeoned to death in his apartment. Vardan Kushnir, 35, was notorious for sending out millions of e-mails advertising English lessons at his Moscow school, the American Language Center. He was believed to have clogged the in-box of nearly every Russian who had an e-mail account. After numerous formal complaints and legal proceedings failed to stop Kushnir, someone posted his address and other personal information on the Web. The papers reported the death under such headlines as “The Spammer Had It Coming,” “Spam Is Deadly,” “Ignoble Death Becomes Russia’s Top Spammer,”and “An Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem.” Police are unlikely to find the killer; many of Moscow’s 15 daily murders go unsolved.