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Confession For Two: A Spammer Spills it All
defender writes "Rejo Zenger, well known Dutch anti-spam activist, recently had a very frank talk with a (now retired) spammer. He got information as to how and why S. Pammer started, where and why he was kicked out, who helped him get his bulletproof hosting, his open proxy mailings etc. It gives a nice and concise view of what the costs for a smalltime spammer are. About 200 Euros for the hosting and ability to spam at least half a million addresses (in a months time). That's for a turnover of 6 times and a net profit of well over twice those initial spam-related costs. Complete with screenshots, of course."
Actually, 523 euro is more like US$650, so it's even worse. For me, it's approaching "won't get out of bed" levels. Which is handy, seeing as you can spam from anywhere in the house :)
I really can't see why anyone would bother...
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Did the Honey Pot Hunter link on the screenshot get anyone else's attention?
screenshot
It seems to me that there is some level of sophisitication to these spammer sites. I'm guessing they are really ripping off the poor shmucks who sign up.
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
support@send-safe.com
good@send-safe.com
techsupport@send-safe.com
orders@send-safe.com
For pre-sale only questions please call 813-747-9677.
heh heh heh, not for "pre-sale only" anymore.
For residential users, who do not pay a per-GB bandwidth transfer fee, spam costs nothing more than time just like telemarketers.
Where does that residential user's ISP get the money to buy the hardware and bandwidth to handle all that spam? The 4 out of 5 emails that their customers would do anything to avoid? Someone has to pay for it. Two words: end users. Just because you don't pay per GB for bandwidth doesn't mean you're not paying for it. It all gets worked into the monthly bill.
When he says that the meat comes from the former Soviet Union, the cheapest food I know of [having lived in Lithuania], seems to come from Belarus or Ukraine, especially from the region around Chernobyl.
Now, if you buy (for example) those add-water-and-heat noodles from the Ukraine, you're going to get a good bit of Cesium(Cs-137?) in it, because -- and this is according to Lithuanian natives, who probably got it in their news -- the Ukrainian government has limits on the amount of Cs that can be in it, but accepts companies taking contaminated grain and mixing it down with uncontaminated grain, to meet the required levels.
Point being, I probably wouldn't suggest that this meat is good to eat, any more than I'd eat lamb from the Scottish moors (sorry, same problem: Chernobyl's Cs-137. It seems that the plants have been recycling the Cs back to the top.)
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Okay, who owns send-safe.com?Gah! The Russian Mob! Well, I'm all for killing spammers, but in SOVIET RUSSIA spammer kills YOU!
Okay, who owns that netblock?Canadians! Back-bacon eating, toque-wearing, Stanley-Cup-losing Canadians. I'd rather take on 25,000,000 Canadians any day than mess with the Russkie Mafia.
Now, who hosts www.send-safe.com?Hmmm...I knew UUNET would pop up somewhere. There are a couple of MTI Software results on Google; one sells support and service for OpenVMS systems, the other sells bulk e-mail software. I think it's the latter...Florida. It figures. First in spam, first in hanging chads, first in the hearts of the nation.
So, to sum up, we have an Axis of Evil: Russians, Canadians, and Floridians, all conspiring to deploy Weapons of Mass E-mail Destruction. Gimme a couple of days to throw together a Powerpoint presentation for the UN Security Council and maybe we can get a posse...err, a coalition together.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
First-class mail rates significantly subsidize the cost of bulk mail.
Nope, it's the other way around. Bulk snail costs the postal service very little to process. It's delivered to the sending post office sorted by zip code and pre-coded; basically, all the system has to do is truck it where it's going and put it in the right bag. Your last birthday card, on the other hand, had to be picked up from the snailbox by a carrier, its address deciphered, bar-coded, sorted by destination, etc. For doing all of that, basically everything but the hauling and final delivery, they get a discount of a whopping six cents -- 30.9 cents instead of 37 cents. Bulk mail supports first class, not the other way around.