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The Economics of Spam
higgins writes "The Wall Street Journal has the best story I've ever seen on the economics of spam. A self-described "spam queen" (Clean link; should work for non-subscribers) talks about not just the millions of emails she spews, but what it costs per mailing ($250 for 500k emails), what the response rates are (1-2 one-thousandths percent) and what she actually makes. (40% of each sale of one product: anti-spam software)."
Here's a new one for you:
The other day, I got spam via my 'windows messaging service' - someone on my cable modem subnet is sending me pop-up spam with the 'net send' command (Windows only). Obviously this is easy to disable (for someone who knows how to) but...
WTF?
I took a screen shot which indicated time/date AND IP but the cableco tech morons said that they couldn't do anything about it? Right... How about revoking access? Perhaps it was the cableco themselves selling this service?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
WorldCom lets spammers get away with 'first offence'.
Mr. Connell typed a response: "Problem solved. This guy won't receive anything from us again." He flagged the name of the offended e-mail recipient on Ms. Betterly's list so that person wouldn't be contacted again.
WorldCom helps spammers listwash.
WorldCom says that if problems with a spammer persist, the company will send increasingly stern notices and eventually cut off service.
WorldCom will let spammers get away with spamming several times before actually doing anything about it.
Paging SPEWS. SPEWS to the white courtesy phone, please...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Ms. Betterly says she refuses to send e-mails about adult fare, because it "disgraces society."
/dev/null.
Yeah whatever - spammers claiming moral superiority over pornographers. What's next, the RIAA claiming it supports artists?
Thankfullly, Spamassassin means I don't have to deal with her garbage. Unfortunately it just hides the problem, but at least I get the satisfaction of a "fuck you" when it redirects to
If you've got an unfortunate friend stuck in Outlook, Cloudmark does a decent job of cleaning up the mess, and Mozilla's soon-to-be turned on anti-spam features are looking nice.
Here is her website:
http://www.dataresourceconsulting.com
And her email:
laura@dataresourceconsulting.com
You may fire when ready.
$250 for 500k emails? This morning I was reading about a guy who is selling a million for 20 bucks.
Fun quote:
"I hate spam," he [the spammer, "Steve"] says. "I've gotten death threats. People have threatened to kill my dog. . . . But when you make a thousand bucks in one day, you could care less."
<sarcasm>Hard to argue with that!</sarcasm>
A quick search on Switchboard shows that she is listed, please everybody call her with your beliefs on spam:
Laura Betterly
717 Weathersfield Dr
Dunedin, FL 34698-7437
(727)733-5335
Good gawd...
No wonder she chose an 'occupation' that doesn't require interaction with others. She looks like a smacked ass!
Blah. It's even a Photoshop filtered black & white picture, which is usually done to make someone look good. They had to do it to her just to upgrade her face to hideous.
I always figured spammers were ugly.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
Spam is theft, plain and simple. Spammers need to be punished.
You know who else needs to be punished? Mainline companies like Symantec who hire obvious fly-by-night spammers to slosh crap ads for Noron SystemWorks all over email, and then deny that Norton has anything to do with it.
About twice a week for the last 6 or 8 months I get the same ad from some theiving yellowbellies. I used to send the ads to piracy@symantec.com. After 10 increasingly strident emails, the neanderthal Symantec hired to insult people who write to piracy@symantec.com finally wrote me back, using both fingers, only to deny the obvious connections between Symantec and the spammers. Hey, unibrow! Do you think I was born yesterday?
I have sworn NEVER to buy a Symantec product because of this spamming.
Well, I also use Linux and NetBSD so it's very unlikely I will ever need Symantec's to fix up a crap Windows installation, but still, I've taken the oath.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
We know:
Her name: Laura Betterly
Her kids names: Chris, 10, and Craig, 11
The city she lives in: DUNEDIN, Fla
What her house is like: 5,000-square-foot home, with a pool
And it even had a picture of her.
A quick Google turns up:
Betterly, Laura
717 Weathersfield Dr.
Dunedin, FL 34698-7437
United States
(1) 727-447-2037
(1) 727-468-2037
-----------
How about someone in Florida drive over there and tell her that the other 99.999% of her email recipients are wishing her bodily harm, and also that they know where she lives.
Hell, why don't we all call her?
`Lex - Find Me Here: Text Appeal
The article showed a pie chart detailing the things spam was selling, and it only indicated "scams" as being 4%.
I'd have to say that only 4% of the spam I get (when I review my spamassassin mailbox for false positives..) to be anything approaching legitimate products and services.
Almost all of it is for penis enhancers (surely fraudulent), fake viagra (ditto), stock schemes (pump 'n' dumps), "financial offers" which are surely either pump-n-dumps or deals so loaded with fees they stretch the definition of legitimate, bogus health products (HGH and the like), and porn, which is far higher than the 12% indicated.
Since this is the WSJ we're talking about, I wonder if this isn't some editorial attempt to de-marginalize spammers and the borderline legal crap they push, with the goal of ultimately softening the opposition so that the big-name direct marketers can start in on this too. Claiming only 4% fraudulent content is stretching the imagination pretty thin.
C'mon, we can't be hypocritical here. You can't call someone up in the middle of the night unless you have an existing business relationship with them.
That's right, no calls unless you've been the recipient of her SPAM.
[Checking inbox... "You Have 362 Unread Messages"]
Well, guess that's taken care of... What was Ms. Betterly's phone number again?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
We all knew that spammers weren't the brightest bulbs on the planet, but giving an interview with your real name and location to a national newspaper does seem a bit foolish, doesn't it?
I'd wholeheartedly support a 1 cent/email fee to be imposed across the board, by law, everywhere. Would you?
Nope. Then people who run legitimate email lists (hobbyists, listservs, PTA, whatever) would be out of luck. A 1000 family PTA group could incur almost $5k/year with a once a week mailing.
Let's not screw the honest person to block the dishonest.
If such things are "the basics of business" for you, I feel sorry for all people that have to do business with you.
Donate free food here
Last time I commented on this, I got accused by some idiot of being a troll. Interestingly enough it was still modded to 5 and considered "Insightful".
The biggest problem with spam is ... the response rates. That is users who actually are dumb enough to open up the email and then reply to it.
If everyone in the whole world suddenly got a clue (and it won't happen) then the response rate for junk emails would be nothing, nada, zip, 0 people and 0%.
Exactly how long would a spamming organisation be able to stay in business if they couldn't even guarantee that in a 6 million mailout, they could not get one sale?
With a response rate as low as 0.002%, do they expect that the people that install and run spam filters are the most likely to respond to spam ?
No, because if you've installed it yourself you're too tech savvy and very very unlikely to buy anything from them. They're gunning for the uneducated masses. Those that do reply.
A 0.002% response rate for 3 million emails is 6 thousand responses. Despite the low percentage, that bold figure is enough for many unscrupulus companies to go "hell yeah!".
Email spamming is quick, cheap and it's easy. So quick, so cheap and so easy that it's seen as worthwhile even if you only get 50 responses. Until that number drops to 1 or 2 then we'll all have to look at other ways of stopping the menace.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
She doesn't forge or falsify the message headers;
But at the far end of the article we read about her computer guy:
Ok, so isn't the "from" line in in some narrow, literal, technical sense, part of the message header? --Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
"I'm just trying to make a living like everyone else," says Tony Soprano. His waste manangement operation, he says, allows hime to raise his children, and to spend quality time with them. "You can call a mob boss, I don't really care. As long as I don't get caught, you don't have to love me or like what I do for a living."
Yet Another Web Site
If you're using the Razor you can change your mail filters file to do this. Make sure you bounce the messages as opposed to forwarding them, that way she can't block the addresses, bouncing also doesn't leave a record of where it came from afaik.
I dunno, if only 20 of us did this, that's 20x the normal amount of spam she's receiving. It'd be hard to find the genuine mail amongst all that. I think she'd get the message.
Colombian drug lords make a living by selling a real product to a customer. It is very unfair of you to insult them by equating them with parasites like Ms Betterly.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
First I bought my own domain name. This allows me to enable new email addresses at any point. I have an unlimited supply. I can create a new email address for anything that I want. Anytime I buy something, I enable an email address with some number and the name of the company in it. Anytime I post to usenet or ask somebody for help from somebody I create a new email address for that purpose. I give all my friends a private email address and ask them to be careful with it.
This means that I can also disable email addresses. I send an autoreponse to any disabled email address saying, "You attempted to send deadsea email, but you used an address that gets too much spam". I then can give them a URL for a contact form if they really need to contact me.
The contact form is the best part though. If you go to my website, the contact form lets you send me email but never reveals my address. It uses an alias system. That means that my addresses won't be harvested to begin with. I made the contact form available under the GPL so you can use it too.
So people can email me, but if I start getting spammed, I can disable an address and people can still contact me. Sure its a pain to have to use the contact form, but it doesn't happen that often. When it does happen, I reply with an email address that can actually be used to contact me.
As for your illegal use of CDs, that's your lookout - you have chosen to put your family at legal risk just to save a couple of bucks on CDs. Or maybe you are taking a moral stand, but you are still choosing to take a risk. Mayhap that's an OK risk for you, but it's still there, don't pretend you aren't breaking a law for your own convenience.
As for the spammers, I have NEVER EVER EVER given "opt-in" permission on my tech contact Email to any business. It was stolen from the Internic "whois" database over ten years ago, and now receives thousands of spams (ironically, I maintain that address as a spam trap now to help me keep a strong access.db) from hundreds of spammers, all of whom make exactly the same claims as Betterly.
It should be obvious that with individuals rapidly and constantly trading lists of as many as 60 million addresses, it is effectively impossible to get "opted out" permanently once one is on such a list. It is equally obvious that there is tremendous financial incentive to create lists without any regard for the wishes of those on the lists, and to represent those lists as "opt-in" when trading with other spammers.
At least you are consistent; you, an admitted scofflaw, are defending other scofflaws. Kudos to you for that, I respect a consistent code of ethics.
Ah even better the double reply CC trick....
2 computers with forwarders set up and one attempts to wangle them to fire an email back and fwd to each other, while cc'ing each time to that email.
In about ten minutes she should receive about 1000 emails saying "Your a bad lady, but I forgive you, so I've attached a core dump file to this email as a present". Catch... May kill your own mailer machines too.
I once sent a 'Get fcked' email to a spammer once and copped an autoreply...
So I sent another one, with the header forged so that it said it came from the machine account autoresponding.(Causing autoresponder loop death) The machine responded to pings for about 2 minutes, and then fell off the earth. Infinite loop email death. THAT'L LEARN YA , YA NUTTY SPAMMER!!!!!!!!
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Visit a spammer's website and gather some contact information, then fire off an email. Don't be shy about including your phone number, suggesting you might be interested in mass mailing.
A couple minutes with pen and paper and you can probably come up with enough questions to keep them busy for an hour, asking about the effectiveness of their marketing technique, options, haggling on payment, so on and so on. If this type thinks there's any chance of completing the transaction, they will stay on the line for a long time. Never tell them off, leave them constantly wondering if you're another perspective client.
It's not dull. You learn quite a few things about the type of person who will do something like this. It's an insight into a pretty twisted world, and it's several million spams they won't get out.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
I got the exact same thing yesterday in my school lab. It is not ironic since the act is intentional. It is called targeted advertising.
e s/ popupspam/index.htm
The message is being listed as being sent from 'WEBPOPUP' since that is the name someone used for their system. Most of these diploma traces so far go to ev1.net, though after a lot of complaints they refuse to do anything. Check out a little information concerning this issue here:
http://www.mynetwatchman.com/kb/security/articl
The program being used is called "Direct Advertiser". If you have NetBIOS bound to your interface, someone using net send will, by default, pipe the message over SMB to TCP 139. But if NetBIOS is not bound to the interface, net send will use UDP 135 instead. It takes the "net" command a bit longer to figure this out, but it does work.
The Direct Advertiser product just skips the preliminaries, knowing that smart system administrators close TCP 139, and goes right for the undocumented back door.
The 'Direct Advertiser' web site even tells you how to not receive these kind of things any more.
How to set up your system not to receive netbios messages
To deliver the message our program uses a NetBios call built into the Windows API.
Click Start->Setings -> Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services
Scroll down and highlight "Messenger"
Right-click the highlighted line and choose Properties.
Click the STOP button.
Select Disable or Manual in the Startup Type scroll bar
Click OK
Windows XP
Click Start->Control Panel
Click Performance and Maintenance
Click Administrative Tools
Double click Services
Scroll down and highlight "Messenger"
Right-click the highlighted line and choose Properties.
Click the STOP button.
Select Disable or Manual in the Startup Type scroll bar
Click OK
Windows 98/ME
Remove or disable the file and printer sharing from your network configuration.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
Well, I could "make a living" selling small boys to pedophiles, or gassing kittens or beating up people on the street for gangsters, but that doesn't make it right.
Here's my mirror.
To the poster who located this, that's just beautiful! I particularly love the crosshair right over her home. You can almost see the smartbomb falling down her chimney in the next instant...
Note to John Ashcroft and freinds: I'm just kidding with the part about the bomb. Really. I'm a pacifist. It's a JOKE.
I'm getting criticism like this from folks who don't read closely enough.
The poster said should not and not can not. In other words, this is the way the poster wants things to be, or thinks they ought to be, or hopes they will be, for the reasons given, but not the way they must be. That filtering is "not the right thing" is a policy assertion, and it is implicit the poster will switch ISP's if the current one downgrades its service. However, the supply of ISP's, esp. broadband, is not infinite, and if ISP's react in a kneejerk fashion the availability of alternative service could dry up quickly -- and unnecessarily.
Before everyone launches a game of Internet doorbell-ditch: it is legitimate to send a real email or make a phone call criticizing what she does (politely -- remember, you're with the good guys). Collectively /. should be able to produce a lot of feedback, at one per person. If she just gets snowed by abuse, so you really think she'll going to think, golly, my ways are in error and I better change jobs? Or just, there are a lot of jerks out there and I better never give another interview?
Harassment is no better than spam. It's using illegitimate needs to get what you want. She is doing something wrong (ethically if not legally; and in many states, legally too) but that entitles us to complain, not retaliate. Two wrongs don't make a right, something like that.
She honestly appears not to get it, or is in serious denial. (By contrast, some spammers do appear to have struck a deal with the Dark Prince.) Explain to her, and everyone else, that spam is a serious problem and not just another form of junk mail.
And most important of all, support laws to regulate spam at the national level, as was done for junk faxes. Make it unquestionable that this hijacking of our tiem and resources is illegal.
(I do detest spam. When email arrives, half the time I switch apps over it's for junk. Currently 2/3 of my unfiltered inbox is spam, and the number keeps growing. I don't even want to think of the theoretical maximum to daily spam.)
Refs at Here and and here as well as a Laura Betterly on the 1997 WISE list. (Co$ organization.)
Yet another scientology spammer, what a surprise!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.