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?

[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.