Security experts have debunked the reported assassination of a Russian spammer and called it a hoax. On Thursday, a blog post on the website Loonov.com claimed a spammer named Alexey Tolstokozhev was shot in the head, "a clear mark of Russian hit men."

The news even made it to the popular technology website Slashdot.org, saying "Alexy Tolstokozhev was recently found murdered in his palatial spam-bought estate near Moscow. The implications of this hands-on method of system administration are staggering."

The story began to unravel when researchers failed to locate Tolstokozhev in records of known spammers, even though Loonov.com claimed he was responsible for "up to 30 percent of all Viagra and penis enlargement-related spam" and made more than $2 million USD in 2007 from these unsolicited e-mails, PC World reported.

The perpetrators behind the hoax remain a mystery and security experts found that the Loonov.com domain name was registered anonymously on the same day the hoax was started. So far they have not found anything suspicious on the website. Security experts, however, suspect that Loonov.com is a spam site.

In 2005 an actual Russian spammer, Vardan Kushnir, was murdered but police concluded that robbery, not spamming, was the motive.