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Who Benefits from Spam, Anyway?
Elbowgeek asks: "I've noticed that the vast majority of spam emails I receive are barely literate, to the point that in some cases one can hardly discern the product or service being advertised. Since most people are savvy/jaded enough to detect these entities that are not filtered automatically, just where does the profit motive from these messages come from? Is it simply the theory that if you send enough spam messages you're very likely to hit enough gullible recipients to make an acceptable amount of money? Does anyone have any insight on this dark underbelly of Internet advertising?"
Well you can assume that some of the Spam is static used to detrain spam filters. But for most cases Spammers make money in sending the Spam, Not selling the services that goes with it. So say they charge $10,000 for a Million emails. So unexpecting company or some poor smuck think he is going to get rich quick with this stuff will pay the spamming companies so much to give the link to their website and sell a product. But there is no promise that they will sell the product they only promise to deliver a million emails. So what normally happens the Smuck goes bankrupt and the Spammer gets the money. If the Spammer can get past the Spam filters then they can promise better visibility.
There is basically an endless pot of Smuck who think they can get rich quick by selling sex toys, Investing in stock tips...
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The short answer: yes. Send out a million emails and get a .1% response and it's more than worth it.
who benefits from all the badly formatted spam? Wasn't there a story about this a day or 2 ago: someone suggested that it wa an attempt to train baysean filters to accept spam?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
While early spam might have been more legit (in that it was actually advertising a respectable product), my theory is that most spam now-a-days is prompted by the same motives that virus writing is (that is, something like satisfaction in hurting / discomforting others). Considering that a lot of the spam is coming from zombie computers (infected by a virus), I don't think my theory may be partially correct.
By doing this
1. Send mass, annoyingly misspelled emails
2. Wait as stupid people wanting (insert lame thing here) open and click on them
3. ??????
4. Profit
Funny createSig(Witty remark, Odd reference)
{
return (Funny)remark + (Funny)reference;
}
It's just like every other business out there. Some people don't know how to run them. Unfortunately, with spam, these idiots are able to make a major anoyance of themselves with their ill-concieved, badly run catastrophies.
Trust me, the illiterate folks really don't make any money. But they're only part of your spam. The one where, you know, you can actually find some information on how to buy a product? They're doing ok.
TW
Apparently a lot of the 'gibberish' spam not trying to sell you anything is just there to try to untrain the spam filters so the next one that does try to sell you something might slip through. Or it negates the spam filters' effectiveness so much that people have to start looking in their spam filters for actual messages.
Personally, I think there's a lot less of a greed factor right now than there is an 'us vs' them' factor. I really think it's just getting to be an elaborate game for these spammers now - all they're trying to do is thwart the filters, and they've forgotten all about trying to dupe people out their money.
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
There are two layers at work; the spammers and the "vendors" they spam for. The spammers are paid to spam, but they don't really care if the product sells or not. It's just like any advertising--magazines are paid to print your ads, but if they ads don't work, it's not their problem.
If you extrapolate normal advertising out by a few orders of magnitude (dumber, cheaper, wider distribution, etc.) you get spam. If you don't extrapolate out far enough (and find yourself in direct mail or telemarketing), no worries. Just keep going in that general direction a while longer, and eventually you'll come to spam.
--MarkusQ
I've spent an inordinate amount of time fighting spam on my server in the past. My guess is that the completely mussed up ones are a combination of the following:
Of those three, only one is intentional. Seeing some large nefarious purpose may be giving the spammers too much credit.
As a side note, some of my favorites are the pharmaceutical spams that say the names of the drugs, but don't offer any means of purchase let alone contact. I often wonder if some madman at GSK or Pfiser is reminding the world that v1a6r@ can be spelled so many different ways.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Is there any point left in spam but to keep spam-blocking companies in business? After all, Internet Security is quite the nice racket...
I'm guessing that spammers profit from the spam? :-)
I've been receiving strange spam messages in the last few weeks containing a ficticious name in the subject line and then a single word in the message body, such as "OK", "cloud" or "door". It's really weird and there isn't an image attachment like most of the spam I've been getting lately so I don't see the point. Perhaps spammers are trying to train Bayesian filters with junk or attempting dictionary like attacks on mail servers to see what words get through and which do not.
The latest trick in the spam arsenal seems to be a crack at social engineering with emails that purport to be from Ebay, Bank of America or whatnot. If you click on the link, and the URL isn't even close to the purported source of the email, it takes you to the spammers web site where the actual marketing is done. Only the truly retarted would click on these links as I would hope that even the most neophyte of web users would know not to follow the links.
Given all the new tricks spammers seem to have up their sleeves, I doubt that spam is done yet, as much as I'd like it to be.
I imagine a lot of it is a denial of service attack. Microsoft is not alone in this. A lot of spam is pure malice. It does not have contact information for a sale or even build brand awareness. Microsoft understands that free software depends on communications between programmers and users and they seek to disrupt it.
Microsoft is unique in wanting to limit network services ISP's have to offer. By creating a problem, such as 80% of the world's spam coming from their broken operating system at the end of cable modems, they gain power as a provider of policy and solutions that cover the majority of the world's computers. Such policies include forced patching which can push new EULAs, and network restrictions that nullify many free software networking advantages. My ISP forces everyone to use their SMTP server with it's arbitrary limits and they told me that M$ and AOL forced them to do it. They also limit upload speed to little better than I could get from DSL. Other infamous suggestions are charging a fee for all email and limiting online advertising to a few "trusted" companies such as themselves. From the problem they create, they seek to gain further advantage and power.
Free software and free networks threaten Microsoft. Their business model depends on selling people second rate software to perform each and every task. They gain adherents by spiffs and arbitrary grants of privilege in an asymmetric computing world. Free software does better than theirs does and makes not grade user status or create arbitrary divisions between "servers" and "work stations" as the eight flavors of Vista do. Why fork over cash to be treated like a serf when you could have all the king's software? Because M$ aims to destroy all simple networking and data exchange protocols, as outlined in their 1998 Halloween Documents. They want to make it as expensive and difficult as possible to leave them. If they don't, people will flock to the vast savings free software has to offer. Free networks and protocols give people the freedom to move.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There is basically an endless pot of Smuck who think they can get rich quick by selling sex toys, Investing in stock tips...
That is one way of making money off spamming but there are others. I know of three examples of people who fell for 419 scams of some sort. The last incident was about a year ago. I always thought these 419 scams were such a public joke nobody fell for them any more but apparently people still do, which is due to greed. But there is spam, or perhaps more like targeted e-mail fraud, that doesn't rely on stupid people or greed. These scams are getting quite sophisticated. People receive e-mails that look legit and even contain personal information about them in the subject line. Once you open them your PC gets spiked with spyware either directly via an attachment or by luring you to a website offering disguised malicious software for download that contains a key-logger or some other sort of spyware. In some cases it's even shareware or demoware that does something useful which makes people less suspicious. Not all that long ago an attack like this resulted in several people in the city where I live getting their online bank accounts cleaned out. Both the 419 scams and various types of online robbery and identity theft are increasingly controlled by organized crime.
I get paid pretty well to deal with this crap and keeping it from getting to our clients. For all the annoyances spammers cause, I'd like to thank them for keeping me employed! And then hit them for even trying to send me spam.
It's a girl!
russian mafia, eastern europeans, chinese govt. americans also send a lot of spam but it's not 'dark underbelly' type stuff.
Hah, interesting! Here is a post on a very related topic: Social Spam and Spam Incentives, as it relates to Simpy. It asks about incentives, about the choices of things that are "spamvertised" (who follows "home loan" links on a site that so obviously stinks of rotten spam?), etc.
Simpy
Oh my twittering jesus, I've seen some really weird conspiracy theories around here but this one definitely takes the cake!!
I've noticed that the vast majority of spam emails I receive are barely literate, to the point that in some cases one can hardly discern the product or service being advertised.
My theory is such spam is being used as a covert channel of communication. If they send a secret message to a million people instead of just the intended recieptient, it hides the secret of the sender / reciever connection in the noise aswell.
I think there are lots of different kinds of spam, and therefore lots of different answers to the OP's question. Examples:
-A spam that they want you to click on in order to see porn. If you click on it, it really does lead to porn, and they get ad revenue.
-A spam that's trying to find out whether your address actually receives mail. If you click on the opt-out link, they've verified that the address works. They then add your e-mail to a list that they send to other spammers.
-The Nigerian scam. Yes, people really do fall for this. There was a famous case here in Orange County recently where a rich, elderly doctor blew hundreds of thousands of dollars on it.
For a spammer who owns a botnet, the cost of sending a spam is zero. When your product costs zero to produce, you can come up with a lot of ways to sell it, and still make a profit.
Find free books.
With telemarketers I can usually discern what company is going to benefit if I purchase whatever they're hawking, but with the above incoherent email, I don't even know what's being advertised, much less how to get it.
http://crummysocks.com
That's not true. Spammers are paid a percentage or flat fee based on what is sold with their referrer ID. Nobody is paid just to spam. Google is the last major advertising company/industry on the web that actually pays people just to advertise, with no results. Porn and spam both figured out that per impression or per click or per email doesn't work, and there haven't been any of those programs available in either industry for at least the past 6 years (yes, they figured this out while all of the "straight" people were jerking themselves off during the dot-com bust).
About your sig, you could close the bracket, and then, I think (iirc) that you can do directly return, might take a cast but i don't think it's even needed ;-)
funny createSig(witty remark, odd reference) //that's how i'd do it ;-)
{
return sigOut = remark + reference;
}
You just got troll'd!
My regular email address gets them from time to time but its my Final Fantasy XI PlayOnline email address that gets them the most.
They are emails with gibberish for subject lines and gibberish for contents. They are sentences which make no sense what so ever, random words put together that have little meaning at all. There's no ad, no link, and the addresses they are sent from are bogus (I know, I tried finding them). A few of these emails have originating address of @ds1.yahoo.com or @server1.paypal.com or @ddl.amazon.com and so on and so forth. The actual address itself is made up of random letters and numbers.
My theory, like those suggested aboove, is that these emails are sent by "Botnets" to random email addresses in order to see which ones don't bounce. This can be in preparation for sending ad-like spam or a prelude to a virus infestation. Or, like someone else suggested it could be a form of coded communication which is widely broadcasted in order to prevent the authorities from find out its true intended destination.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
"Yes, Jimmy, people really do buy spam advertised products"
Fine. Some idiots out there buy vi@gr@ from spam. But I'd be willing to be that damn close to 0% of people WHO ACTIVELY FILTER SPAM buy stuff from spam.
So, who do they try so hard to defeat spam blockers?? Think about it- they are working so very hard in order to make their message reach the very people who specifically try to block it.
Why?
Yea, no need to analyze too much. The casts are there because witty and odd doesn't implicitly make a funny. Of course the casts need to be defined...
Funny createSig(Witty remark, Odd reference)
{
return (Funny)remark + (Funny)reference;
}
You're probably right about zero response from those who actively filter spam. But many people have spam filtered by their ISP or webmail service, and aren't even really aware of it. I think they are the main targets of spam filter evasion.
On the other hand, instead of Johhny being the scammer selling "marketing" services to the sucker manufacturer, sometimes he was the sucker and the manufacturer was the scammer, selling Johnny the case of product and the spamware tools and some lists of "qualified leads".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Fortunately, a lot of that market has gone away, now that the Internet boom's over and the early-adopter spammers either did or didn't make money, and it's mostly run by professionals with armies of zombies instead of armies of wannabees spammers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You don't have to click on the messages in spam to benefit it. If your ad provider gives you money per n impressions, then you just send out a reasonably legit looking email and hope that maybe 5% open it. 5% of 1 million = 50000, and if your ad company gives you a "click" for every 1000 impressions, that's 50x whatever the ad is. If you're doing something obscure like real estate that gives a few dollars per "click", then churning out about a million emails an hour will leave you with more than enough to put the kids the college.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
I'm talking about the spam which combines ever more elaborate ways to spell out \/|/\gr/\ (or teen virgin, or hot MILF) with an obvious complete lack of command of the English language, which is an obvious attempt to get around the filters as opposed to training them. This produces a subject header which is completely unintelligible.
It seems that those who contract the spammers to advertise their product are getting scammed more than the public (see my reply to the first answer above).
Cheers
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
I'm beginning to think they must be paying Google to never tag their crap as spam.
1) Offer free email with gobs of space to instantly become a major player in that area.
2) Punch blatantly obvious holes in the spam filters for your biggest-budget customers.
3) When people complain, simply remind them that it's still in beta.
4) Profit!
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
Almost like the numbers stations on short wave radio in a way. Kinda. Sorta. Or not really.
Still, that was an interesting answer. Thanks!
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
Taking a quick glance at my spam folder, it seems to me that there are a few very logical reasons why people would end up buying from a spammer:
(1) Unavailability (illegal or taboo)
They don't know of any other place to buy the product being advertised (perhaps because it is not advertised elsewhere, or it's illegal to advertise or sell), or they would be too embarassed to research it further or walk into a store that sells the item or request it from a person in "real life."
Examples: penis enlargements, viagra knockoffs (and other shady pharmaceuticals), fake rolexes, porn can also fall into this category.
Often the strategy of spammers could be to just always be "there" so that when someone first decides to enter the market for a product, the easiest source that immediately pops into their minds is spam.
(2) Stock tips: all the spammer has to do is plant the ticker symbol and curiosity takes over. If enough people look at a stock, odds are some of them will take a chance on it and buy, even without research (perhaps they feel lucky). There really is no such thing as bad publicity for an obscure company.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
that the spammers haven't started data mining mailing lists and using legit text from those lists along with their spam garbage.
Spam isn't paid per unit sent - there's no way for the payer to monitor that.
Rather, spammers are paid per unit sale - and, apparently, there is no honor
among thieves, because the second biggest complaint of spammers is
sellers (that is, the people who hire spammers to advertize goods they
sell) is that sellers bug out on them, cheat them, or simply refuse to
pay.
Now, as to the null spams that have been flying around.... who knows. Conspiracy
hypothesis abound, but I've not gotten any clear evidence in any direction
Interesting article in august's wired magazine: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/spamking. html [wired.com]
It talks about the life and death of a "russian spam king", discussing the infamy as well as the money that spam brought him.
There was an excellent paper at the Workshop on Economics and Information Security a few weeks ago which showed that stock pump-and-dump spam works. It was also shown that as more people are discovering this fact they are riding the band-waggon, thereby making it work even better. If you can spot the scam, perpetrated by others, early in the cycle then you can trade the stock yourself and make a profit and not actually be breaking any securities laws, since you're not the one promoting the stock.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
So Microsoft intentionally ships crappy software so that spammers will disrupt communication among open source programmers? Did I get that right?
I think you intentionally missed it.
Microsoft is making the best of things they can't change. They are incapable of shipping a good product because non free development does not work. Spammers take advantage of that. Because M$ can not or will not simply fix their software, they must impose limitations on everyone else or they will lose market share. They try to impose those limits through vendors and by getting bad laws passed. Those laws would make it easier for them to keep their position.
None of that, of course, will stem the flood of spam and M$ is liable to take advantage of that too. It would be very easy for them to hire PR firms to collect email addresses to put on spamlists as they Astroturf various message boards. Disrupting free software communications is a stated goal of theirs.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
what about
spam spam baked beans and spam
it doesn''t have much spam in it.
fad in to the spam spam spam spamity spam soung.
you get the point
Sorry had to do it
Monty P.
Ps sorry but to lazy to look up the correct quote
Here's my last week's stats:
Date, Mail recieved, Blocked spam
Aug 2 00:00:00, 5080, 25147
Aug 3 00:00:00, 4596, 24733
Aug 4 00:00:00, 4243, 27209
Aug 5 00:00:00, 1904, 24784
Aug 6 00:00:00, 2269, 24360
Aug 7 00:00:00, 4725, 32358
Aug 8 00:00:00, 5011, 33012
Aug 9 00:00:00, 5361, 33811
If you look at the stats over the last week for one of my servers, you note that anywhere from 85-91+% of the mail received is spam. This is a huge noise-to-signal ratio, and this doesn't even include a certain percentage of spam which escapes our relay blacklists (we're not using content based filtering so the whole notion of spammers misspelling things to bypass these controls is moot for us).
The point is, spammers use up your resources; your ISP's resources, and your ISP's ISP's resources. All of this translates to higher costs to do business online and reduced efficiency. Any entity that consumes this much resources, at some point, has to find a leak somewhere where the money can flow back in some form to them.
It's kind of like the world's worst band. Even though their music sucks, if they can get enough "airplay" they will always find someone to buy their crap. Since, in the world of spamming, the cost of operation is so cheap (due to stealing, computer tampering and law enforcements apathy towards tracking them down and prosecuting them), there's a good enough margin so that there's money to be made.
Most people don't realize how much traffic on the internet is "noise". I'd estimate that at least half -- half (maybe more like 70-80%) of all internet traffic is completely unsolicited crap consisting of spam e-mail and automated http and port scanning traffic. It's mostly e-mail, but if you look at logs from any web, ssh or ftp server, you'll see a never ending stream of port scans as well. If we could eliminate this bogus traffic, the Internet would be 3-10+ times faster without any infrastructure upgrades.
Contact your local attorney general. Tell them you demand that they take action against spammers and people who tamper with others' computers. This is a felony. Why the feds aren't prosecuting, who knows? But there are plenty of perpetrators that are easily tracked down in domestic jurisdictions.
ISP's do a lot of spam blocking, A0L is especially aggressive. Hotmail and Yahoo accounts have bayesian filters.
Furthermore, corporate mailservers filter, sometimes aggressively. How are you going to sell your v1@gr@ to bored cubicle monkeys if the goddamn company is running a barracuda.
I look at it this way: With every gibberish spam I receive, my treasure trove of character names grows! The fictional sender name is great for characters in an alternate-Earth setting like World of Darkness and Shadowrun, and the goofy words in the subject line make for great fantasy names.
I win.
My MX server advertises STARTTLS, so a fair bit of my incoming mail, and much of my spam, is automatically encrypted on the way. Not most of it, but enough to create a steady stream of "opaque chaff" from exotic locations all over the planet. And that just might make it a *leetle* bit harder for the NSA's traffic analyzers vacuuming up all my packets through their illegal fiber taps at the major switching centers.