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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
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.
- a clean email list - cleaning an email list requires sending an email and not receiving a bounce. There is risk in testing the email because if you test too many bad ones you can get blocked, but once it's tested it's worth considerably more than an unclean email.
- list of active users - users who opened or clicked. An order of magnitude more valuable than a clean email.
- relationships - avoiding email blocks and getting unblocked
- distributed servers - avoid email blocks by sending from and rotating multiple IPs. The more you have, the more stable the delivery is.
- delivery - your email has to make it to the inbox. An order of magnitude more valuable than Bulk box delivery. Bulk delivery is still better than no delivery, which can be the case if you're blocked.
If you have all those factors in your favor, you can sustain the profits, which is what the major "legitimate" commercial emailers do. The true spammers are usually a bit more shitty, using trojans and disposable accounts, but achieve the same effect, usually at the cost of the ISP, however they're risking jail time if they're caught.Camping on quad since 1996.
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.
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").
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.