Russian mafia tactics now used by spammers

As all of you that have a blog must know, comment spam is a huge issue. Some blogs can get thousands(!!!) of comment spam a day. Akismet catches about %95 of the comment spam on this blog. All the other comments are held for moderation unless the comment author has a previously approved comment. I was going through the comment queue this morning, and found the following comment:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

The email address used was a .ru address, and the site url was www.com, much like allot of spam i’ve been getting lately. I will not post his IP address in case he was using a shared ip or something like that, But it is stored fro proof.

So basically this guy is asking for a protection fee (a link to him) in order to stop spamming me. If I had the time, I’d try to get him into allot of trouble. But I don’t. Please feel free to spam him back.