The Family That Spams Together Stays Together

Anonymous Coward writes "The Globe & Mail has a story about an Ontario, Canada man who is being sued, along with his father and brother, by Yahoo under the CAN-SPAM Act. The Yahoo suit claims that Eric Head, along with his father and brother, were sending out millions of spam emails per month, as well as compiling lists of email addresses to sell to other spammers. Eric's company, Gold Disk Canada Inc., gathered lists of email addresses and sold them for $29.99 for 100,000 email addresses on up to $1,599.99 for 10 million addresses."

Comments

Is this really going to make a difference?

[Ckwop]

CAN-SPAM is not going to make a difference in the light that 40% of global e-mail is spam.. and a lot of it comes off American shores..

Every little helps i guess..

Simon.

Re:Is this really going to make a difference?

[Stopmotioncleaverman]

I believe the madness is so intense that it recently rose to an estimated 60%. Say you send out a million spam emails. How many of those do you expect to reply? 30? 50? How many people are actually insane or rich (or both) enough to think "hey, actually, I'll have some of this v1@g|r..-A stuff"? Can it really be worth being a spammer, given the cash you have to lay out in the first place? OR is the idea these days to simply send as much e-mail as possible to no particular end? I know you have to spend money to make money, but $2000? Even 2000 Canadian?

Re:Is this really going to make a difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

All it takes is for a handful of people to respond to a spam with a purchase in order to make it worth it to spam, as long as you don't get sued and lose. Let's assume that you have a product that you spamvertise that costs $10 to make and ship, and for which you charge $20.

If we assume that sending out a million emails costs $10, then if one person out of that million purchases the product, you're exactly even. If more than one responds, you've made money. Even if we were to assume that sending a million emails was to cost $2000, that's still just 200 responses to break even. Getting a response rate of 0.0001% to 0.02% and still breaking even is worth it in some people's minds.

Re:Is this really going to make a difference?

[Just Some Guy]

All it takes is for a handful of people to respond to a spam with a purchase in order to make it worth it to spam,

I keep hearing that, but I don't think it's true for the most part. I doubt that the spammers themselves are profiting from sales any more than your typical advertising agency gets a percentage of the profits from products they promote.

No, spammers sell spam. They convince dense business owners that UCE is a great way to advertise on the cheap. Once they have that money, I don't think they could care less if the businessman makes a single penny.

What I really want to know is this: why would a business owner believe for a second that they've found the one honest, legitimate spammer in the world who acts ethically and really delivers what they've promised?

As long as idiots keep hiring these losers, we'll continue to have spammers, regardless of whether anyone buys their stuff.

Whats Funny..

[Anonymous Coward]

Is yahoo will lose this one. Us law does not have any meaning in canada.

Spam is not an extraditable offense, thus no canadian law has been broken and yahoo will lose.

Sorry guys

Re:Whats Funny..

[Anonymous Coward]

Us law does not have any meaning in canada.

Yeah, right. Dmitry Skylyarov tried explaining that theory about laws designed to protect US corporate interests not applying to people in other countries to the FBI. Some of the guys in Guantanamo tried explaining that theory to the guards as they pulled orange sacks over their heads and cinched the tie-wraps around their wrists behind their backs a little tighter too. US laws apply to everybody on the planet now, and if you don't agree, then GW Bush will get preemptive strike on your ass.

Re:Diluting spammer's harvested addresses (DDoP)

[realmolo]

Ummm...no.

While the idea of having email addresses that simply forward all mail to authorities isn't a bad idea, the idea of the "DDoP" attack you mention is completely misguided.

Spammers profit no matter how much mail they have to send, and no matter how many of those email addresses are bad. The bandwidth costs to send out hundreds of millions of emails is basically nil, compared to what they make back on sales to those poor people dumb enough to actually buy the products they're advertising.

In other words, forcing spammers to send out MORE emails is going to accomplish nothing, except make them more money. They're sending out more emails ANYWAY for that very reason.

Re:Diluting clickthroughs (DDoP)

[G4from128k]

Spammers profit no matter how much mail they have to send, and no matter how many of those email addresses are bad. The bandwidth costs to send out hundreds of millions of emails is basically nil, compared to what they make back on sales to those poor people dumb enough to actually buy the products they're advertising.

Not true. While, spammers do make money at very low rates of return, reducing the rate of return would hurt them. If spammers get 1/10 or 1/100 the number of clickthroughs, they will feel that.

Even if spammers use zombies to send mail, that resource is finite. If spammers find they need one hundred times as many zombies to get the same number if idiots to buy their junk, it will impact them.