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The New Yorker On Spam
aqk notes an article in the Aug. 6th New Yorker surveying the spam problem up-to-date. The New Yorker may not be exactly the MSM, but it is pretty influential. The author got only one fact wrong that I noticed: Canter and Siegel's seminal spam was propagated through Usenet and not email. Still, it's a good look at the history of spam and the scale of the problem today. The amount of spam that "spam king" Robert Alan Soloway, indicted under the CAN-SPAM Act, is accused of sending over a period of four years is now pumped out about every 30 seconds, around the clock, around the world.
I'm in the middle of starting up a small business and was talking to someone about marketing. This individual (Not an in-duh-vidual - a Ph.D.) suggested that I send out mass emails. I told him that I can't do that because I'll be a spammer and my ISP will yank my account. He then mentioned that they're are ways to mask my origins. I said if I get caught doing that, I'll be in even more trouble. Besides, I DON'T want to be a spammer.
My point? Spamming has become so standard and everyday that people don't even give it a second look now and just consider it an annoyance at worst. The only people who really care are those of us in IT.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
This is definitely a start in the right direction, but it's not the whole story. I'm convinced that a massive part of the problem is that there's a widespread belief that spammers make millions of dollars.
No doubt, a very few do. A very few have mansions and island retreats in the Bahamas. But these people are like the Michael Jordans of spammers, the people who have spent an incredible amount of time and effort into honing their spamming skills not just into an art, but a lucrative profession.
The problem is that most spammers aren't the Michael Jordans of spam. They're just people who have heard that spammers make millions of dollars, and they want in on that action. They go out and download the latest scripts and fire off a few million e-mails. No one responds. So they fire off a few million more. After enough times, someone will respond, and they've made $20 bucks. Flush with the thought of new mansions, they fire off millions more. Whoops, that $20 was charged to a stolen card, so they're back to zero.
The point is that the world has changed. Back in the day, there was a lot of money to be made from spam. Now, though, you have a very few scummy individuals who have made massive amounts of money. You have thousands of scummy individuals who think they can do they same thing, but fail miserably. It doesn't matter, though, all you need are the few who do make millions to keep the perception alive that spam = TONS of money, and you'll have people lining up to do it.
What need to happen is that they need to stop focusing so much on the spam "kings" and go after the regular guys who send it out. The people without the million-dollar houses. The people who think that it doesn't hurt anything to fire off a few million e-mails to try to sell some Vigara (yes, I misspelled it deliberately). The press need to cover those stories too. (They really need to cover them more.) People stop seeing Bill the multi-millionaire spam king and start seeing Ted the worthless loser who was so desperate that he thought he could make a million dollars by sending spam.
It's not enough to make spam unprofitable. People have to know it's unprofitable, and that when caught, they'll end up in jail for nothing.