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

Even Better

[freakmn]

you could have spammer spamming software :). Imagine if every time your filters tagged a message as spam it could send an auto reply with a forged header (fake email address and stuff like that, assuming this doesn't get ruled illegal). Then the spammer would get a randomly generated email along the lines of:

Yes, I am very interested in your product. Please send more information to my address at fictionalPerson@non-existantDomain.net.

Now that would be funny.

Come on, do it one better: Send them the e-mail of another spammer, who will see the address and spam back. It's foolproof!

Re:Even Better

[rsilvergun]

Naw, you want the reply to look like a real email, that way spammers waste time on the follow up.

On the other hand, it occurs to me a fake email address will be too easy to filter out (it just bounces). Why not use a real address, with a program configured to randomly generate auto-replies that keep stringing the spammer along. This could work really well for foriegn spammers whose grasp of the the language isn't good enough to pick up on the patterns. Basically you're automating the Nigerian Sweet Revenge :).