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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."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... a 'how to become a spammer' article.
bash: rtfm: command not found
How about paying those vigilant individuals? maybe yahoo or hotmail could pay them?
Hmmm. Net profit of over 400 euros a month, eh? Wow, that will buy a lot of champagne and BMWs! Yeah, that's worth having everyone on Earth hate you.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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
Most orders seem to have been made on impulse: they are done during or immediately after the spam run.
And I'd have thought they'd engage in long, thoughtful consideration before trying an experimental manhood-enhancing product, mortgaging their home, choosing a Third World bride, or deciding which bestiality DVD set to purchase?
The coolest voice ever.
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.
Spammer's Cookbook.
Should make the NY Times Bestseller list in a matter of days along with a few more Euros.
Not funny, and likely to happen.
Reading this article gave me a good idea (Although, it's probably been done before)
Would it be possible to set up to send spam through one of those sites to numerous address you set up? Then, after you recieve the spam, you could block those proxies(being relatively certain that they're zombified machines)
Yes, you would have to spend a bit of cash up front, but it seems (at least in principle) to be a fairly accurate way to find spam relays.
My $0.02..
-Bucky
Every time I get one of those "Mic.ro sofT Sof1w.are cheap!" emails, I am always tempted to start some Linux spam.
"For a low, low fee I can show you the best software site on the internet, everything from operating systems, to office suites, to graphics programs can be yours for free. Yes the sourceforge is a wonderful place. To find out, please send CowboyNeal your first born."
This guy is only making a small profit, and the way he did his business wasn't really taking advantage of the "investment".
Shouldn't he be selling more products, ie he paid EURO$388 for the CDs, he should have used the same CDs for many more products at once, and each of them will guarantee the same readership of 30%.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
...would appear to be in the production and sale of address lists.
l @mx.tldd
Seriously, it would be trivial to write a script to generate e-mail adresses (actual reachability is a moot point). All you would need is a list of registered DNS names with mx records, and a list of names (nationality doesn't matter either: as many nationalities as possible). Then just run through the common variables
firstname.lastname@mx.tld
lastname.firstinitia
first6charsoflastname.firstinitial@mx.tl
and so on....
Costs to burn the CD
Yup, that's where the real money is....
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 sort of people to look at this kind of cost/risk ration and think "cha-ching" may actually be stupid enough to punch themselves in the face (even after reading this post). Where's my film?
if you think this is bad, you should have seen my last sig
I guess he hasn't heard of the White Pages....
Link
I haven't looked at the site. But the world needs a good way of accounting for 'unrealized externalities' in a reasonable way. That's the way to manage the environment and keep capitalism around at the same time.
I think this is, in general, a really hard problem. Partly because sometimes, we don't understand the costs of some activities until they've been going on for a long time. Like DDT, for example. It seems like a wonderful pesticide, and we used it for years before it became clear that it had an enormous hidden environmental cost that hadn't previously been accounted for.
I think, for spam, the problem is much easier. You can use bandwidth costs, and estimate the costs of the wasted human time and attention and come up with a reasonably accurate estimate.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Have a look at the botton of the screenshot pay a visit for the "Send Safe" home page.
Would somebody PLEASE just kill those fuckers?
To sell such a program should be considered a crime for itself!
And have a look at the testimonials... Gosh... we are doomed.
My favorite alternative to replacing SMTP is to adjust the penalty for activities like this guy S.Pammer to be "head mounted on a stick". There is lots of data that says that a majorit of all spam is sent by the top 200 spammers; kill them all in greusome ways, and they are unlikely to have followers :-)
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.
journalists iconify these assholes making them out to be some sort of innocent guy, genius, or otherwise. bottom line is, they're breaking the law, and pissing me off. let *ME* interview one of these guys, you'll surely see a dissection of a spammer.
whose with me? we'll set up some fake wired interview, and just beat them down, hoping they go tell the tale of horror to all of their buddies.
private funding sent a passenger jet in to near-orbit for a little bit over 20 million. i'll do this for 10 million, and a g-mail invite.. we will travel around the world, kicking spammer ass, guido squad style. take no prisoners. all in the name of national security, of course.
I am pleased however that more proactive steps are being taken by organisations such as Spamhaus in addressing the problem by both a technology and policy driven approach in combatting the problem. And that more prosecutions are happening. But I don't see the tide being turned anytime soon.
As for the internet dying, I don't see it. There is now to much commercial interest in it for corporations to sit idly by and do nothing about SPAM and other problems we encounter on the internet. Even our governments misguided steps at regulation, show that the internet is here to stay. It may transform in the future but I don't see it dying just yet.
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.
domain: SEND-SAFE.COMd i.net
d i.net
owner-address: Ibragimov Ruslan
owner-address: 12 Krasnokazarmennaya
owner-address: 111250
owner-address: Moscow
owner-address: Russia
owner-phone: +7.957235641
owner-e-mail: b35ed568876bf16d66d15c298b2159a8-564687@owner.gan
admin-c: IR14-GANDI
tech-c: IR14-GANDI
bill-c: IR14-GANDI
nserver: dns.send-safe.com 217.107.162.252
nserver: dns2.send-safe.com 217.107.162.200
reg_created: 2001-11-14 04:31:54
expires: 2005-11-14 04:31:54
created: 2001-11-14 10:31:55
changed: 2004-04-27 11:56:07
person: Ibragimov Ruslan
nic-hdl: IR14-GANDI
address: 12 Krasnokazarmennaya
address: 111250
address: Moscow
address: Russia
phone: +7.0953632111
e-mail: 184925540b0f833661410d380e699d0c-ir14@contact.gan
lastupdated: 2004-03-16 20:30:07
/me gets back from looking at the screenshot...
...
:)
i'm banning 213.10.0.0/16
-jk
We've /.ed them.
Bwuha-ha-ha-ha, mwuh-mwu-ah mwuh-mw-a-ha-ha-ha.
Seriously though, how about we find an excuse to link to them every week or so and bring their bandwidth to its knees.
FGD 135
this guy is "normal" non-tech user.
he used all 'download and run' services, he built nothing himself.
I think the real money being made here is providing these programs and websites for them to use and also the lists.
This is interesting stuff to consider and would make an interesting business model to create spamware for the spammers and then feed the data to places like spamhaus etc.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Seriously, just off the top of my head I can think of one much-needed business in my (very small) local town that this spammer guy could set-up and he'd make 10x what he made from spamming. Oh and I've just thought of another one.
The world is full of money-making opportunities if you stop thinking about money and start thinking about what people *want* and what useful products and services you can provide. I'm pretty sure you'll find that those opportunities are more profitable than all but the most serious financial crimes.
Unfortunately it will always be profitable, at some level, to spam with the current email setup. The can is open and it will always remain as much of a problem as unwanted callers and junk faxes. Heck, at some point I'm peckered by street vendors trying to sell me something and I find them annoying too.
:). The .01/email type of setup simply won't catch on (hopefully :), but even with "Caller-ID" email somebody, somewhere will still try and spam you at the cost it needs to get the bandwidth. Clever spammers will continue to rape Windows boxes and instead of DIRECTLY sending out the messages properly send it through the subscribers "registered" and "authentic" mail server -- and if they're smart send out a message every 3 minutes now and forever. Times 5,000 infected computers and I'd bet you could still get the message out and make a buck doing it.
:), harvesting messages to spam traps (their game is a doubled edged sword :), and a little filtering I see maybe a couple of messages a month. Maybe. My logs show a very different story though...
;].
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but their efforts -- coupled with whatever other "standard(s)" are incorporated will go a long way to squelching the issue in short order. Yeah, like many of you I'm sitting here waiting for the "right" standard to catch and implement it into my Linux & BSD servers (and soon to be OS X running the same software
TODAY by simply blocking IP's (spam me once from any IP and that IP will never talk to me again, rule #1
Caller-ID email added into the mix and I could whack 'em and stack 'em even faster -- so it will be on par with the number of soliciting phone calls I get [one maybe every six months
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.
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
this is where the UN has started taking looks at 'managing the internet' and the general response from the tech community has been fear and horror.
either we WANT a system that is monitored and every packed is tracked (ala big brother, 1984, the current US DMCA-Patriot Act version of things) OR we must create a self-managing system that provides accountability and protection from fraud.
spamhaus seems to be a step in the right direction, but the direction that microsoft and the various big companies seem to be going is the 'registered sender' approach, which completely defeats the purpose of the internet altogether and creates instead any number of smaller private networks (ala AOL back in the day when normal email couldn't be sent to AOL users and vice versa).
have we improved the situation? unlikely. have we made things so convoluted as to being nearly useless? likely.
Gekido's Lair
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?
Refi = refinance. Or anything dealing with loans? I'm not interested in being a spammer, but I would like to take extreme advantage of these guys who depend on spammers. Reason is, supposedly the loan guys pay up to $50 for each unique lead that responds. Hell, I could "respond" myself via dialup (new IP each time you connect) four times a day, for a cool $200 daily. This wouldn't take but an hour of my time at the most. Add in different loan vendors, and one could rack up EASY money quick.
Marketing email directly from a company I do business with is one thing (acceptable, if annoying). Crap for viagra, home mortages, etc. is another. Most of the spam is very misleading anyway, and targetted towards old people that are easily manipulated (e.g. the mortage spams with the 'I spoke with you this morning' headers). That's borderline.
The crap with the viruses setting up spam relays is criminal.
If only that worked. Unfortunately, simply for the fact that I run a few domains and actually find it helpful for people to be able to contact me without unraveling a mangled email address (hence, I put my email up) - it gets harvested and abused. I can turn off the TV if it annoys me (actually don't currently own one) - I can't turn off the spam w/o loosing my business communication.
I've never bought something from spam, nor do they even get the satisfaction of those stupid image-link bugs getting pinged. Unfortunately, I can't stop the people they take advantage of from falling for their scams, any more than I can make the Citibank phishing expedition and Nigerian 419 scams unprofitable.
About 20 spam/day make it through the filter right now, with another 50 or so going to the spam bin. I get 5-10 legit emails per day. Bayesian filtering is dead now with the random garbage-spewers, so I need to test and install another solution on the server end (until the last 6 months or so, client filtering worked best for me - now it sucks ass). My life shouldn't revolve around dealing with spam. But I'm going to need to spend time on it anyway now.
Since I haven't spent much time on it, it *has* cost me more than time. I had a contract offer go into my spam bin, because the random words horked the bayesian filtering so badly. It wasn't the only false positive I've had, but it's the first time the delay before cleaning the spam bin cost me something - a contract. That just sucks.
I write code.
99.999999% of it is sent via relay rape and compromised machines = criminal trespass, theft of service, unjust enrichment.
the internet survived just fine for a long time without spam. to say spam subsidizes the internet is bullshit -- it raises the costs for everyone and thus makes the internet more expensive, not less. spam isn't a subsidy -- it's a tariff.
spam is destructive because of innocent third parties who are destroyed in the wake of these miscreants sending out their get-rich-schemes and penis pill advertisements.
and these criminals are getting more and more outrageous in their actions. recently a spammer hijacked a california city government network, redirecting them to his own servers where he hosted porn sites and sent out spam. the entire city government network was shut down, utterly destroyed, until they managed to get it back.
if spam is not such a big problem, i'll just forward you all of mine, then.
That's very insightful. Given that spam is an overall economic bad, you can somewhat offset the production of spam by spending money for its removal. Or you could spend money so that it is never produced in the first place.
Maybe we should treat other economic bads (e.g., pollution) in such a way: subsidize the non-production thereof.
Visit their website. /dev/null
Look at all the pages.
Maybe do a wget websuck to
Look for Contact forms, and fill them out.
If it is a Mortgage scam, fill out the forms with random stuff, or put in the name and addresses of known spammers.
Same for the car lookup stuff (How in the world do they make money?)
Keep them busy and waste their time.
If everyone who received a spam visited the site just once I doubt they would be able to afford the bandwidth.
And, just an afterthought on a different note, do most spammers report their spamming income to the tax man? Has anyone ever tried to nail a spammer for tax evasion?
Just thinking about these asshats really burns my toast!
Howdy Doodly Doo!
Anybody want some Toast?
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.
Its kinda like faking where a letter is sent from and who you are at a bank. Its forgery, and fraud. Personally I think people that do this that get caught should end up in jail or shot.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Parent post was a case of an Internet person commenting on the real world. As soon as I posted the comment I instinctively started thinking about the hypothetical business I mentioned, and it's obvious that 1000% profit would be downright impossible to achieve. I still think the spammer guy's an idiot/scum if he's only making 2x/3x profit by *spamming* but apologies for letting my ego run away with me.
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.
I completely agree. My post was referring to spammers who are following the letter of the law. Theft is criminal, fraud is now criminal, using stolen addresses is now criminal, but sending direct marketing to public email addresses is not criminal.
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.
But they do, because it's not so trivial to blacklist them. You blacklist IP's, not servers, and IP's can be passed around. In fact, you can even pay people to host spambots on their home computers. There are plenty of people eager to receive a few tens of dollars a month for no effort of their own. The spammers, even the legal ones, are lightyears ahead of intuitive thought on this topic.
In fact, here's something that everybody forgets: spammers don't want to spam you. Their interest isn't in using your resources, it's in turning a profit. Vehement anti-spammers don't buy the products and services advertised in spam, so why would they bother advertising to them?
What we really need is a registry of spam-unfriendly email addresses. I know it sounds ridiculous, because you think spammers will just use the list to hit you even more... but it's not. If they can go from a 1% success rate using a purchased list to a 15% success rate by easily subtracting a list of known anti-spammers, they'll do it.
Heck, a reputable group like the EFF could host an anti-spam email list and do the subtraction internally so that the spammers never need to see the list...
1) EFF aggregates list of spam-unfriendly addresses.
2) Spammer submits prospect addresses to EFF.
3) EFF returns list minus spam-unfriendly addresses.
4) Spammer only markets to the rest of the list.
They're not evil. They're capitalists.
Putting executable code, even in an interpretive language like TCL, into DNS records is a terrible idea. That offers a whole new channel for attacks. A good one, too; the code would be executed without any user intervention, and sometimes it would be executed on servers.
"Due to my promise to S. Pammer that I would not disclose his name in this report, some facts have been anonymised. S. Pammer is of course not his real name, nor does he sell canned meat. Besides, his identity isn't relevant (there are more small spammers who operate in this manner): the real meat is in the numbers and methods involved. And the numbers and methods are truthfully reported."
Do you only read alternate paragraphs as a time saving measure?
sig
The next time I hear about a spammer spilling his guts, I expect *real* guts from a real spammer.
Oh yeah, screenshots included !
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
It's just a silly way of changing any identifying details... From the 3rd paragraph: "S. Pammer is of course not his real name, nor does he sell canned meat."
You, sir, are clearly a filthy stinking spamming scumbag, or a troll, or both. However, for benefit of the lurkers out there who might actually be misled by your lies, I'll take some time to refute them:
... and not one of them has paid a penny to me, or to my clients, for any addresses they find. The only person paying anything to anyone is me, for the bandwidth they're using in order to gather those addresses, and my clients, who (like all end users) are the ones who end up paying in the end.
Spam is fundamentally identical to telemarketing and direct postal mail.
Spam is nothing like telemarketing or direct postal mail. It is fundamentally identical to telemarketing to your cell phone where you have to pay for airtime. It is telemarketers calling collect and no option to hang up, postage due junk mail with no choice to refuse to pay.
The money telemarketers pay for those calls goes to the companies that carry the network traffic, namely the local and/or long distance phone companies. The telemarketer pays for the network resources they use.
The cost of handling bulk mail is less than what the Post Office charges to send it. The profits the Post Office makes from the bulk mailers pay for the hardspace "network" resources for everyone else.
Spammers do not pay for the resources they use. I've seen recent figures as high as 4 out of 5 emails sent are spam. To look at it another way, this means that if your ISP allocates $10,000 of their revenues to buy some new mailservers, then you, their customer, are only getting the benefit of $2,000 worth of new hardware; the other $8,000 is spent to deliver spam. Since that money is coming from you and other subscribers, then your ISP either has to raise your rates or not give you the increase in service they otherwise would have. If $1 a month out of your bill goes for hardware upgrades, you're getting 20 cents worth and the rest is going to deliver spam.
Spam in no way subsidizes the Internet. The spammers are not paying for the resources they use. They are forcing other people to pay to handle traffic that they do not want. They are forcing every ISP out there, from the big backbone providers to SouthPodunkNet, to shoulder the cost of their advertising. The only money a spammer pays to actually support the network is the cost of a cheap dialup account somewhere. All the rest is paid to other scum for things like lists of email addresses, access to innocent people's hijacked computers, etc. But he is using 10^6 or more of the network resources as everyone else.
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.
Very, very, very few addresses used for spam are those given voluntarily to a website operator. In fact, out of the hundreds of email addresses I've used with various websites and companies, I've gotten spam at exactly one: the one I gave to iBill. The vast majority of addresses used by spammers are extracted from web pages, forum posts, domain registration information, and just about anywhere else.
I watch spammers' spiders scanning domains that I host
Then there are the dictionary spams. Some hijacked computers in Brazil have been bombarding one of my domains all day with spam to random non-existant addresses, trying to find some that get through. People who don't even exist certainly didn't give their email addresses to anyone!
As it happens, I'm the webmaster as well as host for a site with a fair bit of free content, so I think I am in a position to know something of the economics of it. It works like this:
Neither I nor my client has ever received a single penny from a spammer. This particular client happens to have a mailing list (extremely opt-in, and protected like the vault at Fort Knox) for a newsletter. If he should wish to sell it to a spam list vendor, just how much would a list of under a hu
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.
Spam is not a matter of 20 mails a week, it is a matter of hundreds a day and rising. A friend of mine whose email address was compromised by being listed on his college website recently had to abandon that address, and try to contact everyone who knew him to give them his new one, because he was getting 500+ spams a day: over 99% of his email.
The cost of sending snail mail keeps it to a reasonable level. It also means that it is generally very tightly targeted. For example, I subscribe to a gardening magazine, so I get seed catalogs. I do not even have a penis, so I have very little use for penis enlargement pills, let alone fake Viagra and pictures of naked women (with or without horses involved). But because there is effectively no cost to the spammer, I am bombarded with advertisements for all of the above.
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.
Basicly, FBI etc runs an "open relay" that is really a honeypot gobbling up the SPAM.
Leave it going for a while and from there, trace back to the spammers themselves via the logs.
Or theres the worst case scenario system which most people never even dream of happening. Completely locking and disconnecting servers while distrusting everyone you haven't met in real life/someone you can walk up to and punch in the face. In this scenario, there is nothing free 'free' on the net since everyone assumes it'd be abused for evil rather than good (free Yahoo/Hotmail accounts?). No one would visit Slashdot in fear of the site tanking and then having their IP addresses sold to make what little money they can to break even. Public game servers would be non-existant in fear of being hit by a /. effect causing bandwidth costs to skyrocket. Online shopping would go bankrupt since no one would trust putting their credit card information online. Blogs would become non-existant since everyone would be paranoid of one another (whens the last time you gave out your real life phone number to someone you met less than 5 minutes ago on the internet?).
In otherwords, without the establishment of a 'few good guys' the internet would devolve into a hellhole of distrust, the very foundation of the internet in the first place. Its not about money, remember people did is decades ago for a fraction of what they would've gotten today (ie. billions to make Microsoft look like an internet startup). Its all about the belief that none (to few) people will ever use the software like Internet Explorer to brainwash children into believing the Holocaust never happened. Its all about the belief that Slashdot won't turn into a site where terrorists can hide and recieve secret messages to one another. Etc, etc...
The other people who make money, of course, are the people selling the Herbal Fake Viagra or whatever the product of the week is, because their costs are significantly less than what they're paying the spammers that sell it. Mortgage brokers who pay spammers for leads may be winning or losing - spammer-generated leads are likely to be low quality. Pr0n sites sometimes make money and sometimes lose it - they have to generate enough material to get people to actually pay them rather than just looking at the free sample material, and ISPs often charge them more because they're a high-bandwidth business that's highly likely to fail.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Better yet, confiscate the profits from spamming activities and use that to pay them. We need to introduce disincentives. Having some big company pick up the tab just subsidizes the spammers.
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
If their web site is working well enough to poke around on, you can download their programs for free. There's the main send-safe program, some harvester stuff, a "honeypot detector" for finding anti-spammer honeypots, email address verifiers, etc. The stuff looks like it only runs in demo mode (limited number of addresses per run, etc.) unless you buy a license code. The terms of use talk about not using it to illegally spam, but don't say anything about not reverse engineering it (though I haven't tried installing any of the software.) It'd be interesting to see what tools they use for detecting us, and how we can work around them, and of course all that downloading burns their bandwidth, which they're probably paying for by the megabit.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
Don't confuse "the US" with the current administration and president. Many of us are working very hard right now to make sure he doesn't get elected again. The rest of your claims ("horrific record on just about every topic that you could possibly list") just don't hold any water.
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.
Oh, but you do. First-class mail rates significantly subsidize the cost of bulk mail. The USPS knows better than to antagonize some of its largest customers. Ditto for the good folk at the RBOCs.
Actually, that is incorrect. First class is low volume and collected in many places. Bulk mailings are high volume and usually collected at either one location or several locations regionally (like national periodicals). Bulk mailings for the USPS must meet strict guidelines. The more guidelines a mailing meets, the cheaper it is per item. With magazines, for example, if the cover is approved by the USPS, it is cheaper than an unapproved periodical cover because it is easier for machines and letter carriers to read the address. Bulk mailings are cheaper because their collection is streamlined, they are sorted for further discounts, and they have lower priority than first class.
Flamebait? That must be someone with moderator points and a large bruise on their face.
if you think this is bad, you should have seen my last sig
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.
Dumbass.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
All mail admins out there take note. Rejecting connections from blacklisted open relays saves spammers money! Whereas accepting mail from blacklisted relays means the spammer has to pay!
Don't block China, accept all the mail you get from there and stream it to
One of the things I noted in the article was that the bulker only gets "charged" if the email is accepted. Why not begin actually accepting the messages for those that show up in the RBL's, but dumping them after the final "OK" just never sending them onto the final recip?
That doesn't help server load, or bandwidth, but in the end, bulker "A" will get "billed" for sending all these great and informative pieces of crap, and the end result is the same as if we'd refused it with a message they'll never really see, only with this they'll pay for it--small as the cost may be.
The world according to SComps
Thats the thing about collatoral damage. Those doing the damage have the arrogant assumption that it is acceptable because the greater good is served and do not think that they have to take responsibility for it.
So ISPs that allow criminal activities on their network shouldn't have to accept the consequences of their actions, that being that no legitimate networks want their traffic?
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.
No, you shouldn't. No one is forcing anything upon the rogue ISPs. Blacklists are a way for a network to protect itself from the criminal actions perpetuated by ISPs that don't care about their criminal customers by voluntarily refusing traffic. There is absolutely no paralell to voluntarily rejecting packets from a known 'net sewer and torturing Iraqi prisoners. Only a moron would suggest that an effective analogy could be constructed from that.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
the current administration and president ARE what the rest of the world sees as far the general outlook of the US, after all it is the economic policies and foreign policy directions that they provide that affect the rest of the world the most.
;}
of course every american isn't the same, but every american isn't in control of the largest military force the planet has ever seen either
Gekido's Lair
but they aren't all evil.
You're right. Some of them are just too damn stupid to understand that what they are doing is stealing. They're mentally incompetent. I guess that they should be instutionalized rather than jailed.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I never talked about ISPs not having to suffer the consequences of their actions. I was talking about the innocent parties that get involved in these kind of fights having to suffer through no fault of their own. 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.
As for your other reaction to my comments may I draw your attention to the fact that I said my analogy was unreasonable already. My analogy was merely constructed to show how a reasonable assertion that collateral damage is acceptable can turn into real world nightmares for the people caught up in said damage. Perhaps I should of made it clearer that I wasn't comparing the blocking of network traffic to the abuses happening in Iraq.
Maybe we should treat other economic bads (e.g., pollution) in such a way: subsidize the non-production thereof.
;)
Taxing excessive pollution is rather common in Europe. Unfortunately actually paying people for doing the opposite is not
.: Max Romantschuk
With all this talk about it being important to hit the big boys instead of just small fry spammers... I was just googling when I saw the AdSense link to this company that sells, essentially, spamming lists.
They've got a snappy site design, and obviously shelled out enough to be a top google hit, so they're obviously doing well for themselves. Call them at 1-800-395-7707 (number from the page) to let them know how you feel (*wink* *wink*).
Schmiddy
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
I pay for traffic.
80% of my traffic is mail.
50% of my mail is spam.
Therefore, 40% of my bandwidth costs are spam.
Comprende?
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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!!!
The word vigilant, is too close to vigilante for my comfort :)
This is the most civilized way of handling any annoying situation:
1) Confront the annoying person directly, and politely.
2) If 1) fails, inform his superiors or some authority that can punish him for his misdeeds.
3) If 2) fails, try again.
4) If 3) fails, inform said authorities that if they cannot deal with the problem properly, you will take matters into your own hands since they are clearly not doing their jobs.
5) If 4) fails, bury the fucker appropriately out of sight of a backroad in New Jersey.
I'd have to admit that for the most part net.vigilantes jumped right to 5 about 10 years ago, but considering what the government is doing to stop known spammers despite the fact that we have more than enough evidence against them to convict, I think it's about bloody time that we started putting some heads on sticks. If it doesn't teach the others the error of their ways, it will thin their ranks considerably.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I simply forward all of these (including full headers) to piracy@microsoft.com. Fighting these spammers is in the interest of MS, let them handle the problem.
I get my email bounced sometimes because AOL and some other ISPs have blacklisted mine; meanwhile I still get tons of spam. So I'm getting screwed by both the spammers and anti-spammers.
For those using bash, that would probably be something like:
while true ; do `wget -k -p -m http://www.send-safe.com/ --delete-after` ; done
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
Or to put it another way: there's always going to be spam as long as there's a profit to be made out of it. No matter what measures are taken, technical or social, it will only be an escalating arms race of spammer vs anti-spammers (whoever they are). Look at all the wrong things for sale out there: arms dealings, drugs, people and so on. As long as there's someone buying, the incentive remains. The harder it is to sell those things, the bigger the risks, the bigger the profit. The fewer the sellers, the harder they try. The answer to stopping spam is simple: ordinary people must stop responding to spam, stop buying the things they advertise because of the aggressive manner in which they are advertised. The moment the profits are not there anymore because spam itself kills it, spam will go away.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
If spammers were legitimate direct marketters then they would:
a. not forge addresses and headers
b. not repeatedly try to get around the filters that those of us who don't want spam set up.
However, my oppinion on all direct marketting is that it should be banned - it is intrusive, I never asked for it and no matter how many times you ask the marketters not to contact you they still do. I make a point of never buying anything from anyone who has tried to direct market to me. I wonder if anyone has done any research on how many customers companies lose through direct marketting (obviously it's offset by the morons who respond to the marketting but I'd still be interested to see the results of such research).
Most of the direct marketting I receive is completely untargetted:
Mailshots - I get both junk addressed to me (even though I'm registered on the Mail Preference Service) and stuff hand delivered (no, oddly I'm not interested in selling my house... especially since there is a bloody "sold" sign outside indicating that I only just bought the place)
Telemarketting - luckilly most of the telemarketters actually take notice of the Telephone Preference Service register and I don't get too many of these... I still occasionally get cellphone companies phoning my cellphone (which is still on contract - I can't change provider for another 10 months) asking if I want to switch provider.
Spam - oddly enough I'm not interested in making my pen!5 big.g3r - it's just fine as it is thank you.
SMS spam - all those people who claim that charging per email would prevent email spam take your lessons from SMS spam - the operators pay per message there and there is still a huge amount of untargetted crap delivered to my phone even though it's been illegal since December 11th last year. The messages also usually arrive in the middle of the night and wake me up (I have to have my phone turned on when I'm on call)
I am also having problems with the reverse-billed SMS services - technically you have to subscribe to them, but I have never subscribed but have been receiving reverse billed SMS messages. My operator won't do anything about it and tell me I have to contact the company sending the messages (who never answer their phone), so instead I have to contact ICSTIS, who's phones are always busy. Orange have told me there is no way for me to block reverse billed SMS messages and that if I refuse the pay the bill then they will cancel both my handsets and record a bad debt on my credit record. Nice industry - I hate them more than the email spammers.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
"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."
And how about that operator being honest and upfront about their selling emails to spammers? Chances are I wouldn't want their content in the first place.
When did it become anything else but fraud to lie about the costs to your customers?
What these fucktards are doing is no less than if I were to advertise "FREE pens!!!" But once you got one, I start showing up at your place, reading your mail (a RL equivalent of spyware), changing your channel on TV to what _I_ want you to see (adware and spam do a good equivalent of this), and interfering with your phone calls (an equivalent of spam again.) Oh yeah, and start shouting in front of your windows that you better pay for that pen already, you damn freeloading cheapskate. Even though it was advertised as FREE. (Some software advertised as FREE, e.g., RealOne, just loves to behave that way.)
Oh, and there's no way to opt out of that, for the rest of your life. Except if you move and don't give anyone your new address.
It wasn't in the contract, it wasn't in the fine print, and I conveniently forgot to tell you about it when you registered to get a cheap pen. But hey, you should be grateful. You got something for free. Right?
Would you put up with that kind of annoyance just for a stupid pen you probably didn't really need to start with? Chances are that if you knew up front about the real cost you're about to get, you wouldn't want it. And chances are that if I pulled that kind of fraud IRL, you'd sue the pants off me.
So why is dishonesty and fraud suddenly OK just because it happens online? Since when is having some piece of fucking useless and uninteresting HTML text justification enough for fraud? No, really. I want to know.
Oh, and another thing. You may think that making yet another obscure free site is God's gift to the Net. Don't flatter yourself. Most of those sites are free for a damn good reason: that noone would pay for their content even if it was the last site left on the Net.
Here's your free bit of economic clue for the day: the measure of how much something is worth, is how much people would pay for it. If noone wants to pay, maybe that's your clue that your precious content is worth exactly nothing.
And that goes double for blogs. Now far from me to keep people from doing the HTML equivalent of wanking in public and hoping to actually get some attention. But it always cracks me up to see _some_ of them get all infatuated about how their incoherent retarded whining is some valuable source of public information. Oh puh-lease.
And no, it doesn't give you the right to lie, cheat and sell addresses to spammers to keep your worthless content online.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
> You can't even be vaguely serious with what you are saying.
I'm not the OP, but as someone who's called for spammer abuse on so many occasions I feel totally qualified to reply. Do I frequently shout "death to spammers!" and imagine Scott Richter being serially molested by the '76 Raiders? Yes. If I had Alan Ralsky tied in front of me with a bat in my hand, would I cave his skull in? Of course not.
But I'd sure think about it.
And, depending on the state of my inbox that morning, he might walk out with a severe limp.
I'm not a violent person, but spammers sure bring out the black thoughts in me. Why? Because at the core of it they're just *rude*, and that's maddening to me. Imagine this dialogue...
"I am a spammer. I will clog inboxes, I will waste the bandwidth of countless ISP's, and I will force countless thousands of dollars to be spent on support that could be easily avoided. I will send pornography to children, I will taunt truly lonely people by making them think that they have a secret admirer, and I will help people in dire financial straits sink further into debt by promising them spectacular returns on garbage investments. I know that my messages are unwanted, as evidenced by the elaborate and unethical means by which I operate, but I will send them anyway. When I press this button I will harass, inconvenience, and annoy literally millions of people. With each email I send, I confirm that for a few dollars in my pocket I will rob countless others of their time, their money, and the promise of what the net used to be. But I am a spammer, I am an asshole, and I don't care."
Now imagine that coming out of Ralsky's smug face as he stands in his mansion.
And imagine that bat in your hand.
You don't want to swing? Not even a little?