Slashdot Mirror
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."
He's earned 523 Euros which in America = close to 1000 dollars (no I don't have a currency converter).
Job Paying $8/hr * 40/hrs week = $1280 or about $1,000 after taxes, that's the average rate of your Starbucks Coffee guy in the United states, and the money is legit!
Mid level computer programmer (or someone like me) = $50k/year or $3,000/month after taxes.
In short it's getting pretty damn tough for the Spammers I see. The harder we make it, and pretty soon Spamming will just be unprofitable I hope. In the meantime my advice to this spammer = get a real job...even Starbucks Coffee guy is better than what you're doing.
...in bed
is a "pyramid scheme" of sorts. People who may or may not be the most adept at technology or business get the idea to spam. They pay the more "gifted" people at the top money for things like addresses and hosting etc. These are the people who are really cleaning up on spam and should probably be the ones that the authorities go after, cept that they usually hide in places (Russia, Hungary, China etc)where it's hard to enforce international laws, esp. spam laws. Even if we go after the little guy, there will probably be more to take his place, the lure of such "easy money" is too great for some people.
On a side note, it is kind of interesting the comment about bounced mails. My university disabled my account(because they thought I was no longer a student, even though I was) for about 2 months. As soon as I got it re-activated, the spam started flowing in like water again. Amazing.
If no one behaves, it's useless.
But if most behave, a few have a huge incentive to misbehave.
They key is to increase the penalties for misbehaving so that there is no incentive.
The problem is what you're willing to give up. Some servers are probably used for nothing but spam, but what about the other servers. What about the servers that belong to small ISPs, hosting companies (which might be used for MANY businesses), etc? Are you willing to assume all that is spam too? You might lose a decent number of ham messages that way.
But you could definatly use it as another input to a spamassassin type filter.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The problem with spam is it's much harder to catch spammers than illegally polluting factories where disgruntled workers, regular inspections and so on can be used for enforcement. Spammers are hard to catch since they operate through intermediaries in other countries and fly beneath the radar, and because the legal tools to fight spam have been very slow to catch up. And there need to be government organizations dedicated to tracking down and prosecuting spammers, like there are for polluters.
Not in my case; I don't pay extra to receive telemarketing calls or junk mail. Nor does the telephone company or post office block my driveway so I cannot drive to work in the morning. However, spammers have hit my mail server so hard that it cut off my connection to the outside world, preventing me from working from home.
When a spammer takes advantage of a poorly secured system belonging to another person without permission and forges the e-mail addresses of other innocent people not involved in spamming, I will use the word "criminal". I know of no better way to summarize fraud, theft, and trespass.
When I write free software and distribute it for free (with my e-mail address in the documentation so people can contact me or know that I contributed to the project) and I receive spam, how does your argument make sense? There are hundreds of thousands of computers with my e-mail address stored in credits files somewhere; how does this keep the Internet free?
how to invest, a novice's guide
So the 2000+ pieces of spam I get in my mailbox every week, that causes me to miss important messages occasionally because the filter gets them and they get lost in the noise, the several meg ads that tie up my connection for many minutes at a time as they download one after another, all of that is doing me no harm?
I never asked for spam, I never asked for my email to be used as a forged address (a recent development, so now I get complaints and counter spam too). Also I've never bought from a spammer.
These people ARE NOT direct marketers, they are CROOKS, using the bandwidth -I- pay for, to harrass me with things I do not want. And I have no real legal recourse to stopping them because I can afford to sue these hundreds of people. (If I could even find out who most of them were).
And again, please do not tell me they are not doing me any harm while I'm receiving spam complaint messages because some BUTTWIPE is forging my email address on their messages. It's no fun looking at having to change an email address that you've used for almost a decade, and all the associated grief that causes.
Spam is fundamentally identical to telemarketing and direct postal mail.
With the minor exception that direct marketting postal mail generally doesn't come "postage due," and telemarketers usually don't call collect. With spam, significant cost is incurred by those receiving the spam--more so, in fact, than it costs to send it in the first place.
There is no real comparision between traditional forms of direct marketting and spam. A far better example is unsolicitied advertisements sent to your fax machine (which, by the way, is illegal.)
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
This story illustrates that the profitability of spamming is not that great. It would be even less profitable if spammers e-mail address books were even more polluted by bad addresses. And spam would be even less profitable if spam-using sites were innudated with mail.
I wonder if we could kill two birds with one stone. Littering the web with dummy e-mail addresses that include the domains of spam-supported sites. That way, the sites become overwhelmed by inbound mail traffic. It would be a version of this or, better yet, this using real domains of spam-using sites (from a blacklist service). E-mail addys such as sdadhja@viagraspammer.com, eywheh@viagraspammer.com, wywhdi@viagraspammer.com would both cost the spammer and the site that is using spam.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Actually, I would argue that using an open mail relay without concent of the owner of the system it runs on is a criminal act. You have no right to use a system someone else owns without their consent, and if you do so, that is a criminal act. In fact, that defines a great number of criminal acts, appropriating someone else's property for your own use. Be it computational resource or physical one, it is still criminal.
Previously, spammers just used an insecure mail exchange that someone else used, abusing the system. Now, they have worms hack into unsuspecting systems and set up mail relays of their own. These two relays are fundamentally the same.
The only way this would be identical to direct mailing or telemarketing is if, god forbid, they ran their own servers and sent their massive spam blasts. If they did this, then it would not be a criminal act. They won't, however, because that would mean that it would be trivial for most people not wanting spam to blacklist their servers.
I don't believe that "Internet Direct Marketing" can work. Think about it. Many people don't like direct marketing tactics. It's crap in the mailbox that goes right in the garbage. Many many people do not like telemarketing, so much that the telemarketing industry fought tooth and nail to prevent the one tool that could punish and block their attempts to push random promotions onto the masses. Spamming is the same tactic in a new medium, except that unlike direct mail and telemarketing, it uses YOUR resources reguardless if you read the email or not (pick up the phone, open the direct mailer) and you have the potential for much more control over rejecting all kinds of spam at once, and the spammers cannot handle that.
First of all, the cost of spam has never fully been paid by the spammers. Back in the days of Open SMTP relays such the most of the actual cost of the bandwidth was payed by people giving out service for free, because it was cheap and made the internet easier to use by all. Thus spammers stole took free resources and squandered them.
And secondly, spammers never had to pay for the download bandwidth. Imagine if the post office made you pay half postage for every single letter you recived, and someone sent you 10,000 messages. Your choices is either paying thousands of dolars, or forgetting about ever getting postal mail again.
But this is exactly what happend. A mailbox full of spam for a dialup user meant wasted modem time, which whent for as much as $2.95 an hour.
know you don't want to believe that, but it's true. When you give your email to a website operator, and that website operator sells it, that money is what keeps your content cheap or free.
I've never given my email address to a website tht sold it (with the exception being the LA times. But by then I was smart enough to use unique addresses for everything, and all the mail from them gets deleted automaticaly).
Most websites make money by advertizing, not by selling information. On my website, I advertize various pay services, and when the small persentage of people intrested in that service buy something, I get a cut. Some services work pay per click, or by impressions.
Thats the way the vast majority of websites make money. Anyone selling email addresses should be shot.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yes, they do. For awhile, I sent spam complaints from an address used for no other purposes - spamcomplaint@ (my domain). That address now receives spam. They havested the address that I used to send complaints about spam, and they use it to send more spam.
What we really need is a registry of spam-unfriendly email addresses.
Spammers have been known to trade lists of known anti-spammers, known spam-trap addresses, and such. Some of my addresses have (correctly) been on those lists. It doesn't seem to lower the spam, though.
Your basic idea is to create a one-stop "do not spam" list. That's been tried by spammers, by anti-spammers, and even the FTC can see that it won't be effective. You, of course, believe this to be a new concept - but that doesn't change facts.
They're not evil.
Yes, they are. That's why I get bounces because they forge my addresses. Almost all spam is sent using forged addresses because these people are dishonest, unwilling to admit who they are, unwilling to deal with the bounces they cause, unwilling to pay their own bandwidth costs. They don't give a shit if they ruin email for everyone else. They'll do anything they can if they think it *might* get them what they want. Just like a rapists decides that he doesn't care if the woman doesn't want to have sex, he does it anyway to get what he wants. Just like a thief doesn't care that he's screwing some honest citizen when he robs them - as long as he gets what he wants. And just like the rapist and the thief, the spammers are evil, out to get what they want, regardless of the damage it does to others.
As current events go, I can quite easily and unreasonably extend this analogy to the actions of coalition forces in Iraq, with such things as prisoner abuse. But I suppose we shouldn't go there. I better not as I wouldn't want to be labelled as a troll.
My previous posts are in support of measures to stop SPAM but I argued that the methods should be reasonable to stop innocent parties from being hurt. I believe that no amount of harm done to innocent parties is acceptable.
Okay. Let's take a hypothetical ISP, we'll call it "Vertigo" or "Qworst" or "SpewYou Net", doesn't really matter. They allow their customers to engage in unethical, criminal activities. Not only do they let their customers spam, but they also allow their customers to use proxy hijacking to illegally hide the true location of their webservers by using hijacked machines as web proxies. They let their customers engage in DDoS attacks against anti-spam websites without action. They are openly abusive toward people who report the abusive activities of their customers, to the point of threatening lawsuits.
Now lets say that an organization -- an anonymous organization -- publishes a list of known crime-ridden ISPs run by corrupt management. They support the claims of the list with documentation of the criminal activities of the ISP's customers. This list is then used by responsible ISPs to block all traffic from the crime-ridden ISPs, since the ISPs who voluntarily use these lists have decided that they do not want to trade packets with known criminals.
Now let's say that you are a "legitimate" customer of SpewYou Net (now WorldCon). You're not actually doing anything unethical, you just happen to be giving money to a company that openly enables criminal activities in exchange for network space. Unfortunately, you discover that -- because your ISP has allowed their IP space to become a cesspit -- no one wants to trade packets with you.
Who is at fault here? The people who compiled the list of IP addresses owned by crime-friendly ISPs, the ISPs that voluntarily choose to reject your packets, or your ISP for allowing the netspace that they rent to you to become so undesirable to the outside world?
I agree that it's unethical to allow antispam activities that cause harm to third parties. I'm just a little better at assigning appropriate blame.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!