Slashdot Mirror
Meet the Spammers
DaveAtFraud writes: "It took a little digging to find an on-line copy of this article that I first saw in my treeware daily newspaper. Thanks to the Salt Lake City Tribune for having it on-line. According to the Spamhaus project, a handful of people are responsible for 90% of the spam that clogs you in box. This is your chace to hear from them and what they have to say is quite interesting. If you don't think the filters and blacklists work, one spammer whines, "My operating costs have gone up 1,000 percent this year, just so I can figure out how to get around all these filters." Stopping spam is simply a matter of economics. When its uneconomical to send spam, people will stop sending it."
Bernard Balan, 51, who operates a bulk mail site from Emsdale, Ontario, called ne-stop-financial.com, says he has gone through "unbelievable hardships" to keep the spam flowing.
:-)
Now that his website is well known, I bet things just got a lot harder...
You reaally oughta love this quote from a friggin' spammer of all people.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
"This is what the Internet is supposed to be," said Michael Jay, whose Houston-based company, America Find, sends several million messages per day advertising $99 background checks. no it's not. the Internet is for downloading pr0n and copyrighted mp3 songs.
You know we couldn't pass a law like that. Well, maybe in Texas.
I don't see a problem with it. They're in the business of unsolicited harassment too. Tell you what: if they want to opt-out of being stalked, I've got a fake email address that they can write to, and I guarantee that I'll take them off my stalking list.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Yes, but you understand that businesses have a fundamental right to high profits. If we don't buy the pills or videos these guys will band together with other content providers (RIAA/MPAA) and buy legislation forcing us to prop up their failing business models. I see a convergence with MS and Intel, where your upgrades of Windows will read your spam and send money from your credit card to the spammers if you don't buy enough penis pumps. I for one don't want to see this happen, which is why I buy at least one degree from a prestigious non- accredited university a week.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
"Ever received spam from IBM?"
Yes.
Ok, it was the internal newsletters when I worked for them, but I didn't want them...
Maran
Dear interested spammer:
MEDICALLY PROVEN,
OUR PROGRAM WILL ENLARGE YOUR BUDGET,
NATURALLY........
You WILL Gain up to 1000% greater operating costs!
You WILL Get a larger budget!
You WILL Give your accountant MORE pleasure!
You WILL Stay IN DEBT, LONGER!
Most spammers see results within the 1st Month !!! Don't wait! CLICK HERE NOW!!!
I love to answer spam with really really lame messages, do your best to freak them out(if possible, try and fool them into thinking that you are a complete maniac).
Im not sure how effective it is to spam back at the spammers(most use anon email accounts), but it sure is fun. I actually got a couple of replys. One guy had spamed me with a mail trying to sell some sort penis enlargement pill.
I replied that i was hung like a horse, and it actually was a problem. Then explaining what a huuge problem it was for me, since i could only sleep with girls who have given birth to 3-4 kids. In the end i asked for a pill to make my penis SMALLER. Heres the fun stuff, he freaking replied on the mail. Telling me that he HAD a pill that made penis smaller, and how i could buy it.
I replied with a "christ, you're a idiot" and never heard from him again =D
I've also used this tatics before with a very "aggresive" danish religious movement(withnesses of jehova), who spends most of their time going from door to door trying to make people join them.
I told them i thought that Mary was artificially inseminated by aliens, and therefore our religon was something created by a higher race to make us calmer. It freaked the fuck out of them, and im pretty sure that they will NEVER knock on my door again.
Example: A email enters my
I send you this in order to have your advice...
I am a Karma Library.
Better than filters would be a program that would trace the originator and auto-respond with 5-10 messages. Imagine if everyone receiving spam sent back 5-10 messages. Maybe then ISPs would put a stop to it.
I remember the first spam I saw, back in '94, IIRC. Some lawyer selling immigration services. I ran a cron job that night that mailed him a core dump every 15 minutes. It didn't take long to swamp his mailbox.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
You know we couldn't pass a law like that. Well, maybe in Texas.
Don't joke about the death penalty in Texas. They send you to the chair for that kind of thing, y'know.
'No rational religion claims "supernatural" exists, that's an atheist slander.' - seen on slashdot.
From the article, 240 million addreses, of which 20% (1 fifth) get through.
:-
:-
Assuming (a rather low value of) 8 seconds per person who gets the mail to download, consider and delete this piece of crap, that gives 12 years (Math below) of human life eliminated per mailing that this guy sends.
Simple logic dictates then that if this guy is going to send more than 6 mailings in his lifetime that it is ethically correct to execute him now to protect the innocent (cumulative) lives he is destroying.
Assumptions
- an average of 8 seconds to download, consider and delete each spam that gets through the filters.
- Average human lifespan of 75 years or less.
- I've not made any really dumb errors in my math.
Math
240 million address, of which 20% get through.
240/5 = 48.
8 seconds per piece of spam.
48,000,000 * 8 = 384,000,000 seconds of human life destroyed per mailing.
60*60*24*365 seconds per year = 31536000 seconds per year.
384,000,000 / 31,536,000 = 12.17 years of human life eliminated per mailing.
We just need more effective vigilantes.
"Well, things are not so bad; I can manage to unglog 25 outhouses per week nowadays, and business is actually booming, thanks to all that junk food", said Balan, a former spammer and junk e-mailer.
The only problem, he says, "up here in the muskeg, are those damn black flies and those drunken prospectors who shoot at me even if I have an appointment to unclog his outhouse". That's because he's forced to change truck every week because he cannot afford a new one.
But that's not his least of worries. Every so often, the bomb squad has to be flown-in because of a suspicious package destined for Balan arrives in the Post-Office. They are usually packages of dead rotten rats or opossums, but sometimes there is some catshit or worse. Everytime, the community points at him because the Post-Office has to be cordoned-off, which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't also the local watering hole. And, everytime, the municipality has to pick-up the bill, so, for a few time, Balan had to fend-off some angry sober prospectors with prized bottles from his private collection.
My local mega grocery store gets tons of Spam from Hormel. Oh... Wait... Nevermind!
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Insulting the boot is a bootable offense!
All this article does for me is piss me off even more and make me want to block even more spam. I'll probably go out and dig up another couple hundred spamming domains for my blacklist.
Die spammers, die!
So, you want to Meet the Spammers?
The beginning of the story is a bit dull, but it gets better near the end. Skip to the middle if you're too impatient.
Basically, this guy/gal conned a spammer to have a meeting in Amsterdam, and was able to get the spammer on a webcam! The photos are at the end.
(Yeah, slightly off-topic, but what the hell...)
I doubt, therefore I may be.
I am sorry, I saw it beg just now...
Considered harmful.
Kinda like the kids who wrote DeCSS?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
I opened a spam email in my inbox for the hell of it, and found an opt-out link at the bottom of the spam message. So I clicked on it for the hell of it, and guess what?
504 Gateway Timeout This Web page could not be opened. There may be too many people accessing this page or the page may be unavailable. Please try again later.
How unsurprising.