Attacking the Spammer Business Model

Stephen Samuel asks: "Spammers spam because it's an 'easy way to make money'. They send out millions of spams knowing that 99.995% of them will be ignored, but the other 0.005% of responses are pure gold (Andrew Leung at Telus has an excellent report on the economics of spam). Responses to mortage spams are reportedly worth $50.00 each. What would happen if, instead of technical and legal approaches, we simply started attacking their business model? If people started responding to just 1% of the spam we received, spammers would drown in the responses, and the mortage spam responses wouldn't be worth an email, much less $50. The Nigerian Sweet Revenge is an example of this. The nice thing about this sort of statistical approach is that it would start to reward spammers for sending out -fewer- emails. (fewer emails -> fewer bogus responses). What other ways can people think of to attack the spammer business models, and what are the expected downsides of such approaches?" Of course, the one major drawback to this is the likelihood of more spam, since you'll be giving them a valid email address. However, many of you may be receiving increasing amount of spam as it is (even through your filters) so might an organized spam-the-spammers movement work?

Comments

Filters that fight back...

[RevJim]

Paul Graham wrote an article about this regarding spam filters that fight back. If everyone installs a spam filter that detects spam and then automatically crawls any links listed in the spam, it would bring their web servers to their knees.

Here's a link to the article.

http://www.paulgraham.com/ffb.html

Re:The Best Way to Attack Spammers

[sfe_software]

You could always do what I do.

Add all the spammers to an e-mail list and automatically forward any spam I get (using an address I use only for this purpose) to everyone on that list.

Having recently been a victim of having my addresses spoofed by spammers, I don't think this is a good idea. Only if the SPAM actually says to reply for more information (or to make a purchase) would this work; in other words, only if you have a reason to believe that the address is in fact going to reach the spammer.

The majority of SPAM I get does not come from a valid email address, but instead includes a URL to visit or a telephone number to call. Thus, forwarding SPAM to the From/Reply address will either just bounce, or worse, go to the unsuspecting person who's address was inappropriately used.

I know that often the spammers just use a random address from their list as the From/Reply-To, but for a couple of weeks I was the proud recipient of many thousands of bounced SPAM messages, to the extent that I had to temporarily /dev/null my Postmaster alias (violating RFCs of course).

Re:Richest spammers could afford to handle replies

[einer]

Now what about sending them bogus email addresses and phony information? That would send them on a wild goose chase.

That would be form fucker

The plan would work if enough people did it (the single reply, not necessarily the form fucker), and it would work for the same reason that spam makes my inbox useless. A poor signal to noise ratio. Someone has to dig through all of those garbage e-mails and harvest the truly interested parties (both of them).