Former Spammer Reveals Secrets in New Book

StonyandCher writes "A retired spammer is looking to make money from a tell-all book rather than fleecing people dependent on pharmaceuticals and people with gambling problems. In this Computerworld article 'Ed', a retired spammer, predicts the spam problem will only get worse, aided by consumers with dependencies and faster broadband speeds. From the article: 'He sent spam to recovering gambling addicts enticing them to gambling Web sites. He used e-mail addresses of people known to have bought antianxiety medication or antidepressants and targeted them with pharmaceutical spam. Response rates to spam tend to be a fraction of 1 percent. But Ed said he once got a 30 percent response rate for a campaign. The product? A niche type of adult entertainment: photos of fully clothed women popping balloons ... "Yes, I know I'm going to hell," said Ed."

Comments

Paid in CASH?!

[erroneus]

Oh I'm sure the "Department of Homeland Security" with the urging of the IRS will be drafting several letters to get the identity of this guy... paid in cash?! He is bound to be hit up for tax evasion. Yes, indeed he *IS* going to hell, but he won't have to die to get there!

Sod the spammer, how about the sources of his info

[Anonymous Coward]

'He sent spam to recovering gambling addicts enticing them to gambling Web sites. He used e-mail addresses of people known to have bought antianxiety medication or antidepressants and targeted them with pharmaceutical spam. '

Some companies dealing with confidential information clearly have been passing on this information.

This guy should be forced to disclose where he got the information from, so that these companies can be punished for poor data security, or worse, actually selling such sensitive private information on.

I also believe that there are laws against the exploitation of vulnerable people, but they're probably next to useless, and poorly defined (or specifically defined, so won't apply to X because it only mentions Y).

Jeeze! It is too simple

[iminplaya]

As long as there is demand, and the business is profitable, you will have spam. Trying to get rid of spammers will only make it more profitable and worth the risks for those remaining. Wake up! It is no different than anything else. The customer drives this business, not the seller. They(the seller) are simply a response. Talk about passing the buck!

Re:Jeeze! It is too simple

[spun]

Capitalism or any other economic system can in fact be tempered with a sense of justice, fairness, and decency and still function. One way of ensuring that justice, fairness, and decency prevail is to call out the opposite when you see it. Just because something is a certain way doesn't mean it should be. Your wording isn't clear, so let me ask straight up: are you saying we shouldn't criticize people who engage in immoral or unethical behavior but legal behavior?

If a system encourages the exploitation of weakness, is it in the best interest of the weak to support such a system?

Re:One Percent With No Communication Cost!

[mpapet]

Interesting.

I find it very telling that there's very little of the usual /. moral outrage associated with spam.

It's clearly okay for corporations to collect and maintain detailed records of individual consumer preferences, financial records and medical records. And yet, when identity theft stories appear, there is the usual hue and cry "something must be done!"

It seems to me that few people understand the two go together like beer and potato chips.

It may, but there may be solutions

[Sycraft-fu]

It all comes back to the who risk/reward thing. Lower the ratio enough, and you'll find fewer people willing to do it. So on the one side is increasing the risk. Used to be spam had no risk, other than maybe somebody punching you if they found out what you did for a living. Now there's starting to be some risk as a few spammers are getting prosecuted. So that's the first part of the solution is to grow the risk. Get better at having criminal and civil penalties dropped on spammers.

Then, of course, there's reducing the reward, the amount of people who respond. This is a technical solution in the form of better spam filtering. It's already getting much better. Even just 5 years ago it was still somewhat rare to see ISPs filter their mail, now virtually all of them do. Also the filtering itself is getting better. Rather than just rely on a simple analysis of a given message it is cross checking messages, some of it even across different organizations. By improving this we can drastically drop the number of people they are able to successfully contact and thus lower the reward. If 1 in 100 spams go to someone, you don't need many of those someones to respond to make some money. However if less than 1 in 10,000,000 go through, you need a much higher response rate to make it worth while.

So while there's not a silver bullet it IS something that can be mitigated by going at it from a couple of different ways. If it goes from something you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on with zero risk to something that it's hard to make a couple grand a month on that is likely to put you in prison, the number of spammers will start dropping.

Born Every Minute

[_Sprocket_]

From the article:

The ultimate unsolvable problem is users, who continue to buy products marketed by spam, making the industry possible.

Huh. There's a sucker born every minute. The Interenet hasn't changed human nature - just given the con men more tools.

Re:One Percent With No Communication Cost!

[Proteus]

Sorry, I'm failing to see why sending snail mail spam is ok, but email and SMS spam, unsolicited telephone marketting, etc are bad.

Yes, yes you are. Let me break it down, since you're actually speaking of three things here:

1. With "postal spam", otherwise known as "junk mail":
   1. The sender bears the entire cost
   2. Fraudulent claims in ads are pursued
   3. The Direct Marketing Association will gladly remove you from member mailing lists (stopping about 85% of junk mail, in my experience)
2. With email and SMS spam:
   1. The recipient bears the majority of the cost (actually, the ISP does, in terms of increased bandwidth and storage requirements, but they pass these costs on to subscribers in order to keep making a profit; the distinction is therefor irrelevant).
   2. "E-mail fraud" doesn't have the same problems as mail fraud, and is not readily investigated
   3. There is no large central trade association that manages the majority of e-mail marketing -- you often can't get your name off of anyone's lists
3. With telemarketing:
   1. The caller bears the cost
   2. The recipient has no control over the timing (the phone rings during dinner, e.g.), making it very annoying
   3. There is a do-not-call registry

In short, people put up with junk mail because it doesn't cost them anything, only saps a couple of minutes of time once a day (at most!), and isn't particularly annoying.

People don't like e-mail and SMS spam because it costs them something, is very annoying, is often fradulent, and takes time and effort to deal with almost every time one checks one's mail. Likewise, telemarketing is very annoying.