What does a cybercriminal from Estonia have in common with John McCain?

The simple answer is Viagra.

During the election campaign, spammers used McCain's name on email headers advertising Viagra sales. The emails -- with sensational subject lines like McCain dies of heart attack, led unwitting readers to Web sites where they were  enticed to part with their credit card and bank details.

Vladimir Tsastsin, on the other hand, is a sort of godfather figure who was captured last year for credit card fraud, forgery  and money laundering.  He was accused of using online pharma, gambling and porn Web sites as baits to steal credit card information. One of his sites, levitraviagra.net, was drawing in potential victims by peddlling Viagra.

Until his arrest in Estonia, Tsastsin headed EstDomains.com, the 49th largest domain name registrar in the world.  Founded in Estonia and registered in Delaware, EstDomains has been linked to child pornography, cyber criminals in Russia, and spam and scam outfits all over the world.

The Washington Post has done two investigative pieces about Tstatsin: One details his sordid past and the other details Estdomains.com’s spamming ways.

Jetpharmacy.net, laurushealth.com, levitraviagra.net, onlinepharmacyworld.org, and rxinternational.com, are just a few of the 270,000 websites registered by Estdomains.com.

The Post examined just 10,000 of these sites and found that 415 mentioned "pharma", "Viagra", "pills", "rx", "drug", and "meds".  In comparison, 62 mentioned "casino" and 301 related to "porn".

Secure Computing, a company that monitors global Internet threats, says that prescription-drug spam is among the top three most common types of email spam, accounting for 16.5 percent of all spam in the second quarter of 2008. Spam related to “male enhancement” cures trounced all others, accounting for 40% of all spam mail during the same period.

In its study of election-related spam, Secure Computing found that Obama spam outpaced that of McCain by almost 70%. Spammers used phrases like “Obama shows McCain what a real debate should be” and “Obama’s private video” to lure unsuspecting internauts to their sites.

Interestingly enough, Secure Computing discovered that McCain had "20% more spam referencing pharmaceutical Web sites vs. Obama". Those who fell for the spam mail were sent to a Canadian website that feverishly pushed Viagra.