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The Economics Of Spamming
Shardleton writes "What kind of an idiot would buy penis-enlargement pills? Even more idiotic, who would buy them from a spammer? Apparently LOTS of people, according to this article at Wired. The operators of a spamvertised order site left their customer logs exposed. There were 6,000 orders for the pills since July 4. Sayeth Wired: "Do the math and you begin to understand why spammers are willing to put up with the wrath of spam recipients, Internet service providers and federal regulators.""
... I had always wondered if anyone would actually buy from a spammer.
Any chance the spammer did a media honeypot? Released fake records to make marketers *think* he was successful?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Despite my vehement loathing of spam, a recent incident is making me question how we go about dealing with it. Recently, Something Awful has been having issues with the SPEWS list, a popular spam blacklister, who according to Something Awful blacklisted a whole chunk of IP addresses that happened to include their own unabused server without offering recourse or explanation simply because it had the misfortune of sharing address space unknowingly and unwillingly. I'd call that overkill, and more offensive than the perceived problem of spam itself if truth be told. Bayesian filters work, so why do we need to continue inadvertently censoring netizens who have nothing to do with spamming?
I tell you, folks, after reading this article and hearing about what anti-spam proponents have come up with for solutions, I'm starting to have second thoughts about the whole deal. For me it comes down to to the freedom of speech issue -- I've always been told that if you can't handle free speech you don't agree with you obviously can't handle free speech -- and I suppose just because something irritates me doesn't mean that the greater good would be served by silencing that something.
Another perspective is that the amount of money being pumped back into the economy by so-called unsolicited commercial e-mail is nothing to scoff at, and perhaps legislating it in some tolerable form such as limiting a company to one commercial message per person per day would create a new legitimate business method in this country. It's something to think about, certainly. I'd hate to think we're going to lose another revenue stream to outsourcing before we've even had a chance to give it a go locally, and this may be a way for us to recapture some of those IT jobs that have been lost and generate a whole new crop of successful entrepeneurships.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
More and more I've been getting spam that advertises various unscrupulous things, usually the offer of pornographic pictures, but offers no links and has a bad return email address. There is literally no way to contact the the sender without email header hackery.
What is the point? They can't gain anything from this and leaves me completely baffled..
There have got to be some laws these guys are breaking. Why does not the police or government get these guys? We know who they are, where they live, and which companies they are working for. These guys are costing government, businesses and consumers beaucoup $$'s in terms of increased hardware requirements to deal with SPAM load, not to mention the time involvement. What is the holdup?
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This goes against an older article on Wired that said that spammers aren't interested in actually selling anything at all other than e-mail addresses to each other.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
At least telemarketing provides jobs.
Spam provides jobs too in that someone has to write the filter programs so that we are saved from having to manually delete one more fsking spam.
At a major data center, the operation manager was approach by a spamemr who is operating out of msn. The apparently wished to expand their operations at a resonable cost. Problem is that msn is now chargeing them top cents for helping them to hide the spam. Apparently number were shown to the OO and last I heard they were actually thinking about it. This is a major operation. Nothing minor about it. I suspect that the company will take it up.
Look how many GNC stores there are these days. They sell nothing but sugar pills and snake oil.
What makes you think that? GNC sells several useful health products that have very real effects. I buy my multivitamins there, as well as protein powder. Unless the legally-required nutrition label on the side is lying to me, each serving contains 30 grams of protein, just like the container advertises. How is that "sugar pills" or "snake oil?" I buy the powder to get the protein, the container claims to contain protein, the powder actually is protein. I get exactly what I pay for and expect.
I call bullsh*t on you.
But they make billions selling Stacker 2 to fatties too lazy to excersize and too weak willed to stem their eating.
I've heard this comment all the time, too, and I used to think it was true. But as time went on, and I heard the comment more and more, and I met more people taking supplements, creatine, and protein bars/mixes/shakes, I noticed something: they did work out. They weren't just taking the pills and sitting on their asses. Come to think of it, I've never met anyone taking those supplements who wasn't also on some kind of exercise program.
So I call bullsh*t on you again.
Twice in one post. Nice work.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
RTFA. The FTC says there is no proof that these things work but it does not have the resources to follow up. I guess there are bigger fish to fry.
Btw, it also says that the guy has a strange sense of ethics and honoured all refund requests. He's also a national-level expert chess player.
Perhaps all you'd need to do is prove that the primary user of an email address was a minor, and wham, bham, thank you for the million bucks.
At the least it might stop people just randomly hitting yahoo.com or hotmail.com email addresses. On the other hand, if you give your email address to a porn site in the first place, some people might argue that you deserve what you get, quite frankly.
I created a website a month or so ago to address this issue. I believe this will be the ONLY solution to getting rid of spam.
http://www.spamnazi.org
To get the pills, I had to fill out a questionnaire with my medical history.
No, there was no possibility that I was pregnant.
No, I had no history of reproductive illness.
No, I am not a smoker.
Yes, I understand that the pill does not prevent the transmission of STDs.
And so forth.
I submitted my answers, and it proudly announced that I met their criteria and could go on the pill. They were all set to send them to me. I didn't go through with it, though, because of one little thing they didn't bother to ask about... I'm male.
So, the log has 6000 responses, with credit card info. I wonder how many of those 6000 are real, and how many are bogus or stolen credit card numbers from pissed-off spamees?
...is why I get so much spam which is gibberish. I'm not talking about Portugese (about 1/2 my spam originates from Brazil), I mean actual nonsense, often without links, images, or attachments.
What does someone hope to gain from this? Is it some secret code that will give me a giant viagra-enhanced penis and hot schoolgirls to go with it if I can figure it out? At least for normal spam I can see the motivation.
example: I got mail today with the title "rmw oejectivity" and the body "cwdb". Why?!
-puk
There are a number of scripts (going by such names as "Formfucker") foating around to generate random (and totally bogus) orders by filling in spammers' forms.
Can't help but wonder if this is the case here.
Spammers pick the most ... interesting ... mentors:
An investigation (registration to Salon.com required) last month revealed that Bournival's mentor and business partner is Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a chess expert and former neo-Nazi leader who turned to the spam business in 1999 after it became public that his father was Jewish.
Come to think of it, what a nifty idea. To bad I don't have access to a server I could perform such a feat from. ;-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Hey man, give credit where it's due. The first is called Assassination Politics.
A friend and I actually DID go through with a make money fast scheme. Back in '92 when the Internet was really starting to get buzz, we put an add in Popular Science promsing "Valuable information on the Internet just $10" or something similarly hyped. What they got was some photocopied BS we downloaded ourselves; we even reduced it and double-side copied it to keep our costs down.
We figured it was totally legit since, if you read our ad carefully, we did provide exactly what we promised.
I think we got about 10 requests, which we fulfilled, and we ended up basically breaking even or even losing money.
If you read the latest issue of Wired they have an article about the sex.com guy and he says that he advertises for a bestiality site now because the site is fake and people are too embarassed to report it to their credit card companies for a charge-back.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Yes, they ARE breaking laws, at least here in Washington State. They hijack 3rd party SMTP relays to send the spam. The holdup? Washington State's Attorney General's Office will do NOTHING to enforce their own anti-spam laws. You can collect mountains of evidence for them, enough for a hundred thousand dollars worth of penalties or more, and they're not interested. All they do is send you back a form letter encouraging you to file your own civil suit.
WA State Residents: 0. Spammers: 2,624,583.
Instead of going after the spammers, why don't we get wise and go after the people who hire the spammers?
After all, behind every spammer is someone trying to hire them.
Make it against the law to employ a spammer!
Get an undercover 'hit squad' to buy some of these products, which will eventually lead them to the people hiring the spammers, and then fine the hell out of them.
After a few rounds of this, once word gets out, nobody will hire a spammer again. Spamming, as a business, eventually dies.
What do you all think about that? Too simplistic?
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Did the writeup on this story remind anyone else of the expensive, ongoing, and utterly ineffective war on drugs?
...
The war on drugs in the US deals with the problem almost entirely as a 'supply' issue. Decades of failure should convince anyone that you can't solve what is essentially a 'demand' issue by stifling 'supply'. It seems that spam is no different
The question is, do you go with a 'just-say-no' campaign to educate email consumers about spam, or do you accept spam as a (legitimate) fact of life, and work on (government and self) regulations to make it manageable?
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
What if someone used spam to fight spam? They could send spam to collect the e-mail addresses of responders. Then posted those e-mail addresses to a public forum. It wouldn't decrease spam initially, but it might have a damping effect. A recipient would not know if their response would get them pills or a world of hurt.
I know how to get a domain name with false info - no biggie.
I know how to get/use a PO Box with a different or not real name - no biggie.
I know places that will colocate or rent out a server and they won't ask questions about what goes on via the net connection - as long as you pay their higher rates.
So we have the server, we have the address, we have the, and we have a domain name.
Anyone can make up something to sell - fine.
But then you have to be able to take in the credit card info, process it, have that money go into a bank that allows that sort of thing and then keep that money.
That requires a bank account, which now post 9/11 requires a lot of hassle and proof of id to setup - let's assume they set that up prior to 9/11.
But no credit card processing system I can think of (And more importantly the merchant account that puts it into the bank) will allow you to do something like this.
It would keep/block your funds if it even let you set it up in the first place.
I'm truly curious how these guys are getting CC processing if they aren't actually delivering the product that they are advertising.
Even if they are just trying to say "we are back ordered, just wait" and using that to get more money and then eventually taking the money out of the account and just fleeing to the Virgin Islands.... Even then - a bank won't let you take out $300K+ and just leave with it - there is a lot of paperwork involved there...
I'm really curious on this one.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I think that the issue is the Signal To Noise Ratio. On TV your guarenteed a specific Signal to Noise ratio by the TV exec's and the idea behind marketing. (If the noise is too high (i.e. too many commercials.) You will not watch that channel, and then you won't see their ads.) I think on tv our threashold is somewhere around %50. once it's at about %50 commercials we change the channel.
Here's the problem with E-mail, The snr has no method of balance. The snr in e-mail (exp. in hotmail accounts not set to exclusive.) is WAY over %50.
I have been able to keep the snr on my accounts pretty high, but it takes quite a bit of work to keep them that way.
"What kind of an idiot would buy penis-enlargement pills?"
I say, what kind of idiot would swallow a Spammers penis-enlargement pills?
While I appeciate the humor in this article (especially the Penis Man outfit) I have to wonder, did the author actually buy the pills, and take them?
I mean we all have guesses at the ethics some of these spammers possess. It wouldn't suprise any of us for a spammer to just take the money and run. Is it that far a stretch to imagine some psychopath spammer sending out poison as penis enlargment pills? (Also, I think some of the traditional aphrodisiacs are in fact mild poisons.) (I'm getting distracted.)
It's gotten so bad that I sometimes think about sending out spam myself, but as a parody, something to the effect of "Fuck you! Give me Money!" and an explanation that this is what spammers are really saying. I would never actually do this because as Faith said when she took over Buffy's body "It would be Wrong."
I was thinking of these things while reading the comments and got another idea. What if there was spam sent out warning people that spammers selling penis enlargment pills are actually selling poison. Or better than poison, but a poison that renders you completely impotent for life? (For the irony.)
And then I thought that it wouldn't even be neccessary to send it via spam. You could just write up an urband legend "Forward this to Everyone you know! Won't Someone please think of the Children!" type of email a la Good Times warning people of the danger of Spammers Penis Enlargment Pills. Just put a fake quote in there about the FDA or other government organization (OHS?) and the clueless idiots would do the rest.
The Urband Legends websites could write an explanation that it was a hoax meant to point out the fact that you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet and you should never trust a spammer and anyone who buys from a spammer should have the shit beat out of them (or at least people think about it, even normally non-violent people).
Hopefully it wouldn't quote me because then people would be out to beat the shit out of me. That's the problem with these hoaxes, once they get started they get completely out of control.
So in conclusion, this post is just something that is nice to think about. You should not actually do it because it would be wrong. Not to mention that I don't want to get the shit beat out of me repeatedly for starting yet another forward this to everyone you know email hoax.
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And because the pills are "herbal", the FDA doesn't have anything to say about their effects, or whether they work at all.
"download time doesn't cost you money - you're still paying $20/month"
It costs the ISP money, and they presumably pass the cost on to me.
"the email download volume is a lot less than your web surfing volume"
Not even close. Just because you don't have a spam problem doesn't mean others don't.
I should not have to change my habits in any way so that someone can send me adds for penis enlargement at my or my ISPs expense.
"the spam level on my personal email account has grown, but it's still less than my routine work email"
This is the crux of why you don't see the problem. My work communications are almost entirely by email, yet my spam volume is several hundred times larger than my non-spam volume. Without filtering software email would be an unusable medium for me. My filters take out more than 95%, but that means that of the email I have to actually read the subject of and hit delete, less than 1 in 10 is non-spam. I could not begin to search the mail marked as spam for false positives. The situation is getting worse at an alarming rate.
Please don't tell me spam isn't really a problem.