Slashdot Mirror
How to Become A Spammer
permeablepdx points to this story in The Oregonian about
how to become a spammer. Summary: "Local Oregon boy makes big bucks after learning from the Spam masters."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
"The idea is it's just like a commercial," Shiels said. "You don't just send it to one address once. You send it to one address five or six times. Do commercials only come on once? You get the same crap in your e-mail more than once. You have to bombard the person."
And they wonder why they get death threats.
Just what we need! To teach more people this valuable trade.... But really, it won't be worth it. In a few years, so many people will be into it that the companies will have the upper hand on who to hire to get the message out........ and unless you have lists of email addresses in the hundreds of millions it won't be worth it. Besides, your customers will be limited to porn or those sleazy as-seen-on-TV type products. I suggest reading some advertising books, since that is the trade, and finding a more novel way to apply it to the net if you want to make real money.
> Well first I PAY to have an Internet connection, I do not however, pay for the mail that gets sent to me - thats the mailers responsibility. Also it seems a bit more personal being intruded upon in your own home, than having something sitting in your physical mailbox outside on the step, or the entryway to your building. Personally I think snail mail is far more wasteful in terms of actual resources, I just don't directly pay for it and I don't get as much of it and I can recycle it, but the time I spend sifting through hundreds of ridiculous spam emails a day impacts me more directly.
There you have it. I wonder if there is a way of applying this cost to every spammer.
Sure its ok to post the source to DeCSS but now all of a sudden you don't like the SPAMMER-HOWTO? Thats odd I thought you didn't have a problem with it just being information and all.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
If he feels that this stuff is so legitimate, why is he using software that abuses open relays and proxies, and forges mail headers, instead of publishing the real address he is sending his spew from? Hmmm?
It's forgery, plain and simple, and there are laws that deal with it. Prosecute the fsckers on it already!!!
Such as watching DVD movies on operating systems with no DVD playing software. Where as spamming is always a pain in the butt.
Before DeCSS you would not be able to watch a DVD on Linux. Before spamming it was possible to let kids use email with no fears of them seeing obscene things, you can't now. Which is the biggest menace, I'll let you decide.
My mom never believed where I was getting the money and thought I was selling drugs :
At least drug users voluntarily buy the drugs from the dealers.
Note that he says he DOESN'T SPAM ANYMORE. He's not likely to do it again. Let it go. Find somebody who is currently spamming, and go after them.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Note that he didn't necessarily make $1000 a week from people buying the products he advertised. He made $1000 a week from companies who paid him to advertise their stuff. Big difference! He mentioned that mortgage companies would pay him for anyone who requested more informtation, even if that person never actually got the mortgage.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
What's so great about the article? The reason this particular spammer quit!
He quit because of hostile, harassing emails from the angry public! They work! Every email you've sent telling a spammer that they're a worthless turd of a human being had some miniscule effect!
Even now, the guy admits no moral qualms about his former job. He's still a thoughtless punk who sees nothing wrong with the practice, and I'd still like to punch him in the nose. But he QUIT, because we made his life miserable in return.
The lesson: keep giving 'em hell. It's not just gratifying, it sometimes works.
Postal spam is worse. I've gotten to the point that, whenever I move, I *don't* fill out a change of address card because I'm sick of the fliers following me everywhere I go. I usually get 2 or 3 legitimate items of postal mail a week, versus dozens of bulk-mail ads. I'd simply not check my mailbox (which involves a 6-minute hike to the front of the apartment complex and back) but not checking it for more than a couple days causes my box to be crammed full. So, should I be more annoyed with: A)E-Spam, which takes me a whole 5 seconds to filter every time I check my e-mail, and is almost certainly mixed in with legitimate e-mails or B)A daily 6-minute hike which generally has the sole purpose of emptying my mailbox to physically make room for more bulk mail, with little chance of any practical yeild. See my\his point? (and no comments about needing the exercise, I quite enjoy walking - when it's by my choice out of no other obligation)
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
1. Mugging them on the street (theft of service).
2. "Brrowing" their cars without permission to rob a bank even though they return them later, so what, difference does it make? (using someone elses mail server to relay spam).
3. Sending threats to politicians using your address as the return address (using some innocent person's email address as the return address for bounced spam).
4. Handing out pornographic magazines to everyone that walks by--10 meters away from an elementary school (sending porn spam when you have no clue whether or not the recepient is even an adult).
The NERVE of some of us getting upset about such silly things.
Ive seen a rehash in this thread of several sensible (and not so sensible) ideas regarding reducing spam, and making life tougher for spammers. One idea this article gave me, however, that i havent seen discussed much, involves these message boards that were alluded to in the article.
A digital social network (in the form of bullitain boards, etc) through which people can trade information about addresses, software, and spamming methods should be a trivial thing for a large digitally sophisticated crowd (ie slashdot) to find and then attack, either by trolling/flooding, or more outright destructive means.
This dosent address the actual hardware involved in sending and receiving spam, but rather constitutes a multi-front assault against a subculture. Maybe it wont stop all spam, but it would make it harder for people to get into the spam business, by either exposing this social infrastructure and diluting it, or disabling it violently by disrupting the virtual real-estate it resides in.
He's been involved in the spamming business for 6 months
He spent the first 5 months researching and one month of spamming
He spent $10.000 on spam-software
He claims he made $1000 a week.
4 weeks times $1000=$4000 income.
$4000 income minus $10.000 is -$6000. So, the guy loses $6000 on spamming.
Film at eleven...
Regardless of anyone's single belief, SPAM is still not a felony. To make the analogy: Someone spams me today and tomorrow it becomes a federal offense punishable by law. He is subject to the law as it was writtn YESTERDAY. Now, if I killed someone 10 years ago...I'm still going to punished; under the law written 10 years ago. Either way, the laws today should NOT reflect those of 10 years ago, unless an aspiring lawyer wants to set precedent.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
> Obtaining a valid list of e-mail addresses is not very easy,
> you either need to invest money or you need to figure out how
> to harvest e-mails from the web/usenet.
That part's trivial. You'll get 50% invalid addresses, but so what?
Step 3 is easier than you think: at this time, you don't have to
fool the filters of the 0.05% who use even moderately complex
filters[1]; all you have to do is get past the things that are
deployed ISP-wide, like psmtp.com's filtering service. (This is
trivial to get past: write three spams at random, and two of them
will get past. No cleverness required.)
If you have to get past word blacklists, then you also need to use
a thesaurus (or 1337 sp33k), but word blacklists are relatively
uncommon, because they get too many false positives. Really, all
you have to do is get past the filters that ISPs deploy, not the
ones individuals install. Remember, if you have to send twice as
many messages to get the same response, it doesn't cost you that
much more. (This is what makes spam so problematic. *Almost*
makes me want the estamps thing to succeed.)
The hard part is convincing businesses that have money (and are
therefore presumably profitable) that they can gain more than
they lose by investing in your services. I assume you send all
the businesses in the universe adverts for your services and hope
0.001% of them bite. I would like to think that more than 99.9%
of them know better, but... I know better. Fortunately each
spammer has to compete with all the others for limited business,
so the number of spammers who can make money spamming is finite.
Praises be.
As for point 4, finding a spam-friendly ISP is a real pain; it's
much easier to run port scans and find open relays, then test
them to see which ones *don't* do a reverse lookup of your IP.
Then you send to the open relay from a custom MTA that you run
on a dynamic IP in such a way that it randomly generates From
and Received headers and such for each message, thus making it
a real pain for the recipient to track down where the spam
*originated*. Finding out where it came from to your ISP is
easy, but that's an open relay in the APNIC block whose IP is
not reverse-lookupable (virtually *nothing* in APNIC supplies
PTR records), and so tracking down the owner of the relay is
hard, and they don't speak your language, and they don't give
a rodent's posterior about your spam problem. For extra bonus
points, get a hosting deal in Asia and run your MTA there, so
that tracing you back to your ISP in the US is basically
impossible, and if we *do* figure out who runs the MTA in Asia,
we'll assume it's an open relay, provided you insert the usual
forged Received headers. Yes, I've spent way too much time
looking at mail headers.
So in conclusion, the main thing preventing a lot of people such
as myself from becomming spammers is that we hate spam. That, and
it's so obviously *wrong*.
[1] e.g., people like me, who trained a naive bayesian mail
classification system (ifile) on a collection of tens of
thousands of well-categorised messages in 3 dozen distinct
categories, including several distinct spam categories.
But actually, with a modicum of cleverness, a naive bayesian
system can be easily defeated. As soon as I read how the
algorithm works, I realised inside ten minutes how they can
defeat it. Consequently, they can figure it out too; if
enough people start using such systems they'll do that, and
we'll have to get more clever with our mail classification
systems, taking context into account for tokens, at which
point they'll drag out the Markov chain generators, which
will be *hell* to try to filter against. At that point it
might be easiest to hire somebody in the third world (where
the ecconomy is suc
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
As much as I hate spam, I disagree.
The article shows various interesting things, one of them being that spammers are hated like beelzebub himself. If that does not prevent one from starting it, what does?
I must admit I was tempted about the idea of "taking revenge" on a spammer, but no. Stop spamming and repent, that is good enough for me.
Alex
P.S.: Then again... he raked in $4.000/mo. Maybe he should donate some of that money to spamhaus.org
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder