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?"

Comments

Re:To many stupid greedy people.

[oyenstikker]

Bingo. Nobody actually needs to ever buy the product for spam to be profitable. Thats why it won't go away.

lots of kinds of spam

[bcrowell]

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.

Re:Not true

[MarkusQ]

Spammers are paid a percentage or flat fee based on what is sold with their referrer ID.

I beg to differ. First, such a system would be all but unenforceable, and I can't see the spamers (who are the ones that will be risking prosecution, after all) saying, "Oh sure, you can pay me when you sell something; I can tell you guys are honest." But it also doesn't fit the data. Let's take a look at my in box, shall we?

1. Some folks selling "C-i-a-l-l-i-s" (or trying to). Looking at the raw message, I see one http: link, to a .info domain, with nothing beyond the FQD. They could of course have a separate domain for each spammer they used, but given how specific their domain name is it doesn't seem likely.
2. A blank spam. No subject, no body, no referrer ID.
3. A note from my wife. No referrer ID.
4. A pump and dump stock scam spam, no response info of any kind, and thus untraceable. No web bugs or other place to hide a refere ID.
5. A question from one of my company's laywers. No referrer ID that I can see.
6. A note from a psycho that believes the internet is spying on him. Spam, in a sense, but I think he's trying to warn us out of the goodness of his heart. No ID of any kind, and I suspect that if he knew his emails contain a message ID and a give an idea of the route they followed getting here, he'd faint.
7. Image spam; quite possibly tracable (I don't know what they image is; I don't fetch 'em).
8. Guttenspam. No payload.
9. Another image spam.
10. A note from my boss commenting on one of my earlier /. posts.
11. Another anonymous stock tip.
12. And another.
13. Watch replicas, one link, with only a FQD.

Sorry, I'm just not seeing the referrer IDs you speak of.

--MarkusQ