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A Day In The Life Of A Spammer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the pay-it-forward dept.

kaip writes "Internetnews.com has a story of a spammer. The individual sends 60 million spam emails for four days worth of work and claims that one in 19 of AOL users clicks the links in his mortgage spam (this number should however be taken with a grain of salt, see rules 1 and 2). Maybe not everybody has heard of the Boulder Pledge... The article also tells how the CAN-SPAM Act, which legalises spamming, is turning the US into the spam haven of the world. Currently, 86 percent of the total spam volume is coming from the States."

1 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. As I always do when a spam story pops up... by The+Ultimate+Fartkno · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...allow me to pimp two of my favorite projects. First up is the Unsolicited Commando project. It's a little java app that spends its day quietly and merrily filling out forms on spamvertised websites with completely bogus - and yet totally real looking - data. It's especially effective against - surprise! - mortgage/refinance spammers, which seems to be the specialty of the dirtbag mentioned in the article. Go check it out, and the source code is available just in case you think something fishy is going on.
    The second page I'd like to point you to is here. It's a 'Lad Vampire' antispam page that also targets spamvertised websites, but in a different way. The page links to individual images on the sites and constantly reloads them without caching, thereby burning up the spammers' bandwidth and driving them out of business (or at least costing them some money and forcing them to sell their children on the black market). Be forewarned that the page has no help, no documentation, and *only* works in IE, so don't yell at me about that. The source code is available for that as well, so here's hoping someone can make it more usable in Moz, Opera, ThunderFireBunnyChicken, or whatever browser is your fave.