Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's a pop-up book? Sorry, couldn't resist.
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.
.41/each) and having a 1% return rate... If only I could retire on the money I make ;)
I work with targeted communications and our success rates with similar lists are just as "successful". We were looking to contact Juniors and Seniors in HS to let them know of our offerings and had a list that supposedly contained names and addresses (no e-mail/phone) of people that would be in this demographic. Out of 9800 people we had a 0.93% response rate. Being that the cost of that list was as low as it was we will do it again...
I can only imagine what an advantage it is having such a low communication cost (it costs us
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!
It's the only kind of adult entertainment fully endorsed by my church and my local clown guild.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
I've never gotten such spam.
I'm surprised it was only 30% -- that kind of thing is bound to pique the interest of a whole lotta people.
(Oh, come on, admit it, you're googling it right now, aren't you? Oh, maybe I'm going to hell too
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
'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).
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!
What?
...but part of me wants there to be a very special hell for spammers (and people who talk in the theater).
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Enjoy!
http://www.vimeo.com/78881
It is like those get rich quick schemes on paid TV. If it were so easy, then why is the promoter not making the million dollars a week instead of making cheesy commercials. If I made a million a week for a year, I certainly would not be on TV telling everyone about it, at the risk of reducing my real profit opportuities. I would hiding out in my fortress of richness and enjoying the money.
This also reinforces my assumption that for the most part spamming is just a way to make some easy money without much real work. Most people are not going to get rich off it, but if one is a country where a few thousand a year is good money, then hey, it beats doing honest work. It might even product the 20K a year one needs to live in the US. But like any organized crime, a few get insanely rich, and the rest get knocked off for pocket change.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
This seems like the least objectionable use of spam. There seem to be three problems with spam.
First, truely evil spam that contains malware, fraudulent offers, or other things that people might call the police about if it arrived via snail-mail (I'm assuming the adult entertainment site was just pornography and not malware infested).
Second, that the spammer uses botnets to accomplish his goal, which is to hid his operation because of spam-filtering/laws etc (I'm assuming the botnet is just for anonimity, as a huge e-mail server shouldn't be that costly to run.)
Finally, that we are diluged in 3,000-1,000,000 e-mails a day for crap we don't want. But a 30% success rate means that the ads were fairly well targeted and most people did want them. Ignoring for the moment the scary database that produces these lists, if you got 10 pieces of spam offering you legitimite, cheap things you may want to buy, I don't think people would be upset at all. In fact, it might make a good e-commerce site.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Pics anyone?
Damn! A balloon fetish? Who would have thought? Ain't the Internet great?
For the lazy, see http://www.mellyloon.com/ and http://www.looneynudes.com/preview/lnasampl.html and others (Google away, dudes).
Oddly, it's just not appealing to me. I'm not be the Slashdot uber-geek I thought I was. Now perhaps, balloon pooping . . .
A 30% response rate? Either:
a. That was an EXTREMELY targeted spam run. In which case, WHERE did he get the email addresses?
b. Considering that there are usually a few million emails sent out in a spam run, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people who responded to that.
Neither one makes much sense to me. Oh, that's right. Rule #1 - spammers lie.
Watching her inflate the balloon too much... you know it's gonna pop, you know she knows it... but she just keeps going... <<shiver>>
This was an actual ad that frequently ran in the national enquirer
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
Huh. There's a sucker born every minute. The Interenet hasn't changed human nature - just given the con men more tools.
Yes, let's see... women forced to do something that they are frightened of... complete with shrieks, wincing, and hesitation.
Now, let's think of the kinds of people who would pay money to watch that...
Thought so.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
How many people work at credit card and insurance companies doing low-paid data entry? How much more could they make if they were using some of their time to make lists of names and addresses of people with specific ailments or problems and selling them on the black market?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Yes, he did, a Beowulf cluster of them, while eating hot grits, and he had nat port stickers on the cases, and he had a full collection of OMG PONIES and he called himself the "I for one welcome our obligatory overlords" and his business plan was
/. accounts for people who continue to beat the dead horse...
1. spam
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
I for one wish there was a -6 beating a dead horse mod
I also wish i had the ability to delete
No doubt there'll be some troll along shortly claiming that the GIMP suit is clunky and hard to use, and that they prefer a PhotoShop suit.
a. That was an EXTREMELY targeted spam run. In which case, WHERE did he get the email addresses?
Maybe it was the email database from a softcore porn site that specializes in fully-clothed women popping balloons?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
My guess? Right before he wrote that, he created a website with women popping balloons and is now making tons of revenue off the huge volume of views the ads on the site are getting now that it's being /.'d.
Ignoring for the moment the scary database that produces these lists, if you got 10 pieces of spam offering you legitimite, cheap things you may want to buy, I don't think people would be upset at all. In fact, it might make a good e-commerce site.
I would. I'd mind terribly. Putting aside the creepy privacy issues (which would be enough to set me off), I just simply don't like push advertising at all. I don't want my life to interrupted by people interjecting their pleas for me to give them my money for crap I don't need.
I don't like TV ads. I don't like radio ads. I don't like billboards. I don't like fliers on phone poles. I HATE people who stick menus in my apartment door, I HATE telemarketers, and I'd hate spammers too even if they were selling me things I want. I have a habit of stopping doing business with any business that gets too pushy with its advertising (like the people who stick menus in your door), and a spam for something I want is the best way to keep me from ever buying it (at least from that vendor).
The only kind of advertising that I like is the kind where you list a product in some public forum, and I find it when I decide I'm in the market for it. (e.g. Froogle.) Anything that tries to come and find me to tell me how wonderful my life would be if I just bought it is annoying. (And God forbid an ad actually be effective and influence me to do something unwise with my money.) Unless your ad entertains me, go away.
(And yes, I realize that I am on the far end of crotchety about advertising, but that's just my opinion.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
What about the possibility of spammers themselves working as data entry employees and then getting first hand access to data themselves and selling it or using it on the spam market ?
While there is nothing immoral in the pictures, but part of the sin lies in the objectification or women. If you're still objectifying them, its still wrong.
brought to you by the local morality guide.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Spammers pay real money for botnets/phishing websites etc, but their return is higher
than their expenses so they continue to plague us. Our spamfiltering solutions may
diminish their return, but apparently not enough.
One interesting approach (from MIT Spam Conference) was these guys (SPAMALOT), who basically interact with the spammer as much as possible.
http://acm.cs.uic.edu/~lszyba1/
I really think its a good idea. If a spammer is trying to get a credit card, give them 50000 phonies. Imagine what would happen to spammers if everyone responded to all their spam? The only probem I see is it might make it easy for malicious people to DOS real web stores, by sending out spam for those stores.
Any other ideas?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Por