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The Family That Spams Together Stays Together

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the thats-just-bizarre dept.

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."

4 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Is this really going to make a difference? by Ckwop · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Is this really going to make a difference? by Stopmotioncleaverman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

    2. Re:Is this really going to make a difference? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. Re:Diluting spammer's harvested addresses (DDoP) by realmolo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.