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."

Comments

Article text (posting AC):

[Anonymous Coward]

VIAGRA, KICK START YOUR SEX LIFE NOW! . . . By clicking here, you can instantly access hundreds of the nation's top insurance companies . . . It enables people to burn more fat doing nothing.

Until late last year, Shiels was an e-mail spammer. The type demonized in every nook of American society. A prodigious Internet marketer, who from his Portland home sent up to 10 million unsolicited e-mail advertisements a day for other companies.

He said he made as much as $1,000 a week -- and could have raked in a lot more if he hadn't quit the business in October, six months after he started. The path to spamming success requires expensive investments in software and the agility to adjust to the technological warfare between spammers and companies that try to block their messages. It also requires the stamina to withstand daily hate mail and even death threats.

Shiels decided a spamming career wasn't worth the personal cost. But his story, which he agreed to share with The Oregonian, shows the challenge that consumer advocates and government leaders face as they try eradicate spam. The Oregon House on Tuesday unanimously passed anti-spam legislation. Most other states also have tackled the problem, but nobody seems to know how to solve it.

As the war on spam trods along, public frustration grows.

Even after installing software to filter spam, many e-mail users must wade through dozens of unwanted e-mail messages a day, which slows the fast-paced communications that made the Internet rise to prominence. Ferris Research estimates fighting and sorting through spam will cost U.S. corporations $10 billion this year.

When lawmakers and companies fight spam, they're not up against teenage hobbyists and pranksters. They face thousands of pros like Shiels, who have high-tech tools and an immense network of knowledge that is difficult to overcome.

"All the little punks in their garage who are trying it are not getting anywhere," Shiels said. "The ones sending you all the stuff are the big boys, the ones who do it for a living."

The fast-talking ex-spammer, at a sturdy 6 feet, doesn't resemble the picture of an antisocial digital anarchist spamming from a dark basement. That's the image painted by legislators, Internet companies and frustrated e-mail users.

Duncan Shiels, 41, was raised in an upscale neighborhood in Portland's West Hills. Wide glasses, light brown hair and a neatly trimmed goatee frame a genial face. He left his hometown to become a Hollywood stuntman and then a police officer before returning five years ago as a budding Internet entrepreneur.

Entering a murky world In 1998, Shiels quit his patrol sergeant job at the Adelanto Police Department in Southern California and moved back home to Portland to start a full-time career in Web design, a hobby he had been dabbling in for five years.

He said he succeeded early on, with a small business that employed two other people. But Shiels saw business fall off in the past few years. Prices plunged because "everybody became a Web designer."

By early last year, he needed a new source of cash. He noticed about 100 spam messages flooding his e-mail account each day. Instead of complaining about it, he wanted to learn how the anonymous salespeople earn a living. Someone is making money off this, he reasoned. Why shouldn't it be him?

He began a quest that would lead to a six-month career in spamming.

Shiels had never purchased anything advertised in a spam message, but he knew that some people must.

"It's just another form of advertising," he explained, laughing. "Granted, the stuff that's being sold, it's not very intriguing."

He'd heard enough complaints about spam from his friends, but he never understood them. The junk mail his mail carrier delivers bothers him much more, Shiels said.

"It costs money to be processed. And it's a waste of trees. It's intrusive as hell because you have to go through all of it. People don't get mad about that, and I