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

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: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 I believe that it has made the problem much worse, and it's just going to get worse until that POS law is repealed.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.

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.

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: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.