How the Spam Industry is Sustained

mOoZik writes "The BBC has an interesting article about spam and why it's still around. According to a survey, nearly 1/3 of users have clicked on spam messages and 1/10 have bought products advertised therein. "If no-one responded to junk e-mail and didn't buy products sold in this way, then spam would be as extinct as the dinosaurs.""

Comments

Re:1 in 10 slashdotters?

[mOoZik]

Yes, average. I should have clarified! :)

Regardless, I haven't bought anything from spam. Even if something interestd me, I would be worried about getting ripped off. That said, nothing so far has. Yes, not even "enlargement" offers. ;)

Longevity of spammers != "clicking" in emails

[papaia]

I did not need to click on anything to have the spammers generate traffic - all I had to do was to setup a honeypot, then advertise an email address "having used" the honeypot through Newsgroups (actually my research related to much more than that, but this is a /. simplification), then identify test messages, to let them through and let spammers believe that my honeypot is in fact an open proxy - and in 11 hrs I got a few GB of spam running to my "open proxy", allowing me to study it. I have never let it out of my box, but it definitely gave the spammers adrenaline enough to keep them around for longer ... and they are still pounding my box, one year after the end of the project, and from allowing their test messages go through, and half a year since the domain whom the box belonged to, expired. Is anybody still wondering about spammers longevity?!?

Re:Stats breakdown via country

[cft_128]

The vast majority of spam that I get is targeted at Americans, and hence completely irrelevent to me. For a while 80% of the spam that I got (admittedly not a lot relative to other people) was Korean and Chinese, I have no idea how or why they got my email address.

Re:That's fucken it.

[NetNifty]

Well I've started spreading rumors about people buying stuff from spammers and getting tape worm eggs/cyanide pills/another disgusting or poisonous thing instead of medication...

It's very true

[EvilStein]

Now before you all start on the "Yeah, I have a 11" penis and 36DDD breasts!" take a look at some of the spam you get. Seriously, look at a lot of it.

producttestpanel.com is a good example. Spams for discount cruises from travel companies. Spam for free movie tickets (yes, I worked for the company that did that!) and spam for other free/discount products. It's not all porn & pills. in fact, the spammers I worked for adamantly refused to send out mails for porn or pills, but "$50 Gift Cards!" and "Try our coffee samples!" were ok.

This is a *huge industry* - some of these companies were sending us checks for $60,000 per month to blast out emails.

CAN-SPAM definitely has NOT helped. I believe that it has made the problem much worse, and it's just going to get worse until that POS law is repealed.

Re:Stats breakdown via country

[Taladar]

Actually no. But e.g. in Germany where I live we don't have many dumb (as in: would reply to spam) people that speak english good enough to understand the english spam messages and have a credit card (most people here don't have one). So the group of potential customers for english spam is far lower than in the US.

Re:Sigh...

[Jesus_666]

(I think it would be great to require a semester of media literacy in high school, where students learn all the classic propaganda techniques and how to spot them...)

In Germany, that's what Politics and History classes are for. Saying "you are bad because your parents were bad because their parents killed thirty million people" repeatedly while shoving information material about the NSDAP down the students' throats is a pretty good way to create people who distrust politicians, themselves and everyone else.
One of the things everyone here who isn't extremely dense learns in school is that people, once there are enough of them and they are sufficiently happy and/or indoctrinated, are like sheep. Oh, and that it's easy to gain majority support for a violent regime by giving the people food and work when both are rare.

The Federal Republic of Germany - mass-producing cynics since 1948. We would be proud about it, but we outlawed national pride, so meh.

I met a spam customer once

[billstewart]

She had some cheerful business cards. Turns out she'd gotten them "free" from a web site she heard about in an email. Of course, the shipping for the 250 "free" cards cost about $7, so she ended up paying about what should would have if she'd gone to a reputable printer. My wife and I looked at each other sadly and decided it wasn't likely to be worth trying to educate her...

Re:Most users just aren't very smart

[houghi]

They just accept spam the same way they accept junk snail-mail.

So they throw it out?

No, people will read and react to junk snailmail. I used to work for a Time-Share company who would send out 10.000 mails (of the snail kind) and would get a response of about 200 resulting in about 10 sales of the value between 8000 and 35000USD per sales. (No, that is not all profit)

The moment sales dropped, we could not get the salesnumber anymore, so we stopped and closed the company. Lessen to the public. As soon as you stop buying, the spamming will stop.

Support your local store, stop buying anything over the Internet.

Re:Dividing by zero continues

[T-Ranger]

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Mortgage spam economics are little different

[triclipse]

Because with mortgage spam, the consumer is not actually buying anything. They are clicking on the link and submitting their information. In the course of litigating a California mortgage spam case, I have discovered how many layers of "lead companies" there are between the actual spammer and the end user, who is not the consumer that clicked on the link, but is rather the mortgage broker who ultimately makes the call to the consumer who clicked on the link.

In the course of my pre-suit investigation, I did several canary traps. Just one response to one piece of spam resulted in calls from over 40 mortgage brokers. These brokers had paid between $30 and $50 dollars for that lead. They had purchased it from a "lead generator" company who had paid between $20 and $30 dollars, and these companies had in turn bought it from another lead generator company! And I haven't even reached the actual spammer yet.

So, one response to one piece of spam funded an entire chain of companies selling leads, generating well over $1000 in income for various persons. The consumer had parted with no cash...

Re:worrying, or just wanting?

[Havenwar]

You do not seem to know much about intimate anatomy.

Ever heard of kegel exercizes? I've known women who have given birth that are tighter than some "virgins", just because they know they have muscles down there that can be used to heighten the experience for both parties.

Why should all that fall on the man, eh? Why should we eat pills and stretch it and even operate it just to get it bigger and better? But yes, I agree with you that a man has the right to "wish"... if he is so inclined.

Just. Stop. TRYING.

Nah, I'm pretty satisfied with my rather small pecker, myself. And so are the people I've shared it with... No reason to wish for a bigger lizard just because you have a lacking love-life... trust me, thats not because of the one-eyed trouser snake. Thats because of YOU.

Re:That's fucken it.

[Anne Thwacks]

Unfortunately, its only available in the Motorola 6800 (not 68000), and not in the 8x86 family.

Actually, several other microcontrollers had similar instructions - they activate the pull-ups and pull-downs in the IO ports at the same time, thus shorting the power rails through the IO port.

This can be relied upon to release all the magic smoke that powers the processor.

Re:That's fucken it.

[m50d]

As a serious solution for more modern computers, look at the chernobyl virus. Basically you reflash the bios with random data. The flash rom is usually soldered so it costs more to replace than to buy a new motherboard. Nasty, very nasty.

Re:Dividing by zero continues

[Technician]

However, none of this is possible without a REAL economic model underlying email.

Posted by the phone.. "Never buy anything from anyone that calls you. It may be a fraud."

Posted by the computer.. "Never buy from anyone that mails you. It's probably a fraud."

If you want something, search it out. Find the reputable dealers. The real suppliers are in the yellow pages or can be found with a Google search. Don't buy anything from an unknown supplier without finding out about the BBB complaints and web sucks sites. I saved my wife from a Ramada Plaza vacation disaster offer in the mail by a quick google search for compaints. There were many and a few class action lawsuits. The company does have a reputation. A bad one. No reputation at all is a bad sign. Might be a new shell. Look for a good reputation. An occasional unhappy consumer is normal. Not every company will refund triple the cost and have the manager shot, so not every consumer will be happy.