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12% of E-mail Users Have Responded To Spam
Meshach writes "An article in Ars Technica claims that 12% of internet users have actually responded to spam messages and tried to buy items. Although I find this hard to believe, it does explain why my spam folder is always full." Also in spam news, wjousts links to a Technology Review article about how spammers get your e-mail address, writing "E-mail addresses in comments posted to a website had a high probability of getting spammed, while of the 70 e-mail addresses submitted during registration at various websites, only 4 got spammed."
I'm posting as an anonymous coward, so they don't spam my e-mail address.
and details regarding wow from this web site. Irony abounds.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
How else are they going to win the Nigerian lottery? You can't win if you don't enter.
Thought thinks itself.
12%?
Really? I honestly thought it would be much higher...just basing that off of some of my daily interactions with people. It's a good thing breathing is an involuntary action, cause there are a lot of people out there who'd forget to.
Sent from your iPad.
The entire premise of this article depends on the definition of "spam." One could mark a legitimate business' unsolicited email as spam, but that doesn't mean that purchasing a product because of the material in one of those emails is newsworthy.
Nigerian princes in peril are another matter, though.
Quick somebody build a program that causes the users computer to explode when they answer yes on the survey. Plaster it all over the web and in one stroke spam becomes a thing of the past and the bell curve for the whole race improves drastically.
Please stop. Thanks, The Internet
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Terrify people into compliance!
"Hey, y'know gramma - I heard answering junk email funds the terrorists." ...
"Yep, that's right - that email you've got right there advertising cheap knob-expanders? That came straight from Osama bin Laden's laptop, uh huh."
I would have liked the article to state which sites sell e-mail addresses to spammers. They would certainly deserve it.
I use unique e-mail addresses for (almost) everything I sign up for, and I've never gotten a spam message from any of those unique accounts. I started getting a lot of spam when I first posted to LKML, which is published online.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
And should be executed immediately!
The data may be skewed: users may consider offers from genuine mailing lists 'spam' whether they've signed up to it intentionally or not, when completing a survey. This more relevant stuff is more likely click-worthy. The survey doesn't necessarily make this distinction and account for it.
Otherwise, it is somewhat believable as many individuals new to the internet learn many lessons the hard way.
Mind you, "but another 13 percent said they simply had no idea why they did it; they just did." explains why I still receive 'send this to 10 people or you will has bad luck' from otherwise intelligent and educated people.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
While 12% seems reasonable for the amount of people who have responded to spam at least once (think of the first time a banner told you you were the 1,000,000th visitor), I suspect the number is much, much lower for the percentage of people who continuously respond to spam.
"The Y chromosome is genetic. The odds are very good that if you are male then your father was too." -Internet Commenter
Hey! I got a great deal on penis enlargement, breast enhancement, and this greasy stuff you rub all over your body to increase your sexual desirability scent! Works great! Now if I could only get the dog to stop sniffing me, all the women would be barking at my door!
Sad to say, one of the places that I buy "generic viagra" from would not return my money when it did not work as well as the "super size me" products... I will just have to wait for my money from the deal I made in Nigeria to counter that loss.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
I hate to say this, but 12% sounds really low. I'd expect it to be somewhere in the 20-30% range.
This guy's the limit!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OK first of all i would assume a small part that those 12% of people have friends who have an infected machine. and these machines are sending them spam. i am currently having this problem and it is very annoying but because it is from a friend it is not filtered so any idiot may just open it because it got to his/her inbox.
everyone else is just an idiot.
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
I get a crapload of spam from the UAE (Dubai) and the only way I can think about how my email got harvested was that I once wrote a letter on an Al-Jazeera forum mentioning that not all Americans want to invade Iraq when the current Gulf War started.
I've noticed multiple resellers have my email now are are even soliciting me to buy their spam list as they are spamming me.
What is most annoying is that I am now getting emails that state that "this is not a spam email because is it from blah blah".
Spammers simply need to die. It's that simple.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
There's a guy who responds to his spam and posts the letters on his site. It's hilarious :)
I don't know if the site is still up, but I know it's blocked by my proxy at work, so it has been identified as a time waster by people who filter websites for a living. You have been warned ;)
http://thespamletters.com/
This space left intentionally blank.
Has it not occurred to us that surveys do not sell as well as desired if they are not controversial?
Anyone who responds to spam should be executed. Send them on the express train to Huntsville Texas and they should not pass go or collect $200.
and that was it. No link, no pictures. My theory is I have a really good friend who goes through a whole lot of effort just to make me smile. Either that, or it's an insult on my manhood designed to make me feel inadequate.
I always hear people bitching that they had fallen for some spam offer and never actually received any items. Only once in a while you hear of someone having received some worthless or non-functional thing but never the actual merchandise they promised. It seems like for the most part you can equate spam with scam. It's just sad that so many people still fall victims to it and loose their money to the scammers.
http://www.otherinbox.com/
I got this username and email as an experiment. I have only posted it publicly on Slashdot and have not used it for anything else. I don't even check it. I just checked. I have 5,000 messages in my spam folder. And gmail deletes them after a month. So posting my email publicly on Slashdot only is resulting in 5,000 spams a month.
Cheapest V1agra ever!!
What disturbs me isn't the spam that comes from botnets of infected Windows PCs on residential broadband connections. I expect that. What bothers me is the spam that comes from dedicated servers colocated in actual datacenters, with static IP addresses, domain names, reverse DNS properly configured, and valid SPF records.
For example, these are apparently all owned by one spammer, that I've received spam from in the past few days:
mx5.mit9zinger.com
mx2.finogento.com
mx1.finogento.com
mx4.pinchmir.com
mx1.travel1soe.com
mx2.kintopuzi.com
mx1.petchin.com
mx1.abaganawena.com
mx1.tineraset.com
mx2.kimbolimbo.com
mx2.greenzetrain.com
From a technical standpoint, everything looks legitimate. Because they offer an apparently-working opt-out mechanism (I'm sure it really just marks your address as "confirmed", but you'd have to come up with a way to prove that) and they're not spoofing any headers, they're probably not in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I have two email addresses on yahoo.com. One is a jumble of letters and numbers which I use to for access to things I have no desire to ever see again. Dump things like "we'll email you the download link". That email address, which has been around for 7+ years gets the odd spam here and there.
The other yahoo.com email address is used only to enroll in a number of Yahoo groups and never given out or used for email. (I'm a ham and for whatever reason the ham community has fallen in love with Yahoo groups.) This second email address receives between 100-200 spams per week.
Keeping in mind that the second email address has never been given out, where did the spammers get my email address from? I can only assume that either Yahoo sells email addresses used in groups for "targeted advertising" or that they have a huge security hole through which the leak Yahoo group email address.
In any case... What spam? Use Yahoo Groups!
We've known for quite some time that spammers pick up email addresses by trolling the internet. With spam so insanely cheap - and highly profitable - to send out, there is no incentive for the spammers to select for email addresses that are known to be read regularly (or ever).
If they can harvest 1,000 new addresses in a few minutes of bot-crawling the internet, versus a few dozen by buying them from someone with a form somewhere, the choice is pretty simple.
The take-home message of this is something we've known for quite some time - don't let your email address out on public pages.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'll shamelessly admit it: I've used Craigslist Personals to help me find dates. Before the entire hullabaloo regarding "erotic services," it was actually possible to get a few good, quality dates off the service. In fact, I was doing better on CL than other highly-regarded dating services, often using the same techniques! Spam was prevalent, but was often easy to spot and avoid.
Recently, I had a brief falling out with my girlfriend and browsed through CL to see other people. I was upset, but not surprised, to find that not only were almost ALL of the postings spam, but the ones that looked strikingly legitimate (and I'm talking "real person," excellent grammar legitimate) were often spam bait as well! It comes to show that spammers are getting pretty crafty in their techniques, both technically and socially.
Kind of sucks that it's almost impossible to get dates through Craigslist now, though.
...makes absolutely NO sense in-context. The GP chose to display his e-mail address publicly. That means any promise to keep his address "totally private" explicitly does not apply.
My sig can beat up your sig.
50% of all people have less than average IQs. I'm surprised the 12% isn't higher.
Free Martian Whores!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Because I like to scambait.
By swearing and trying other spam filters mostly :)
That would mean that 88% of internet users are not retarded..
Not so sure about that, man.
Richard B. Cheney
No. 16 Kingsway Road
Ikoyi, Lagos
Nigeria.
Tel/Fax: 234-1-7747907
15th July, 2009.
First I must solicit your confidence in this transaction.This is by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and top secret. We are top officials of the Federal Government Contract Review Panel who are interested in importation of goods into our country with funds which are presently trapped in Nigeria. In order to commence this business we solicit your assistance to enable us RECIEVE the said trapped funds ABROAD.
The source of this fund is as follows : During the regime of our late head of state, Gen. Sani Abacha, the government officials set up companies and awarded themselves contracts which were grossly over-invoiced in various Ministries. The NEW CIVILIAN Government set up a Contract Review Panel (C.R.P) and we have identified a lot of inflated contract funds which are presently floating in the Central Bank of Nigeria (C.B.N).
However, due to our position as civil servants and members of this panel, we cannot acquire this money in our names. I have therefore, been delegated as a matter of trust by my colleagues of the panel to look for an Overseas partner INTO whose ACCOUNT the sum of US$31,000,000.00 (Thirty one Million United States Dollars) WILL BE PAID BY TELEGRAPHIC TRANSFER. Hence we are writing you this letter.We have agreed to share the money thus:
70% for us (the officials)
20% for the FOREIGN PARTNER (you)
10% to be used in settling taxation and all local and foreign expenses.
It is from this 70% that we wish to commence the importation business.
Please note that this transaction is 100% safe and we hope THAT THE FUNDS CAN ARRIVE YOUR ACCOUNT in latest ten (10) banking days from the date of reciept of the following information by TEL/FAX: 234-1-7747907: A SUITABLE NAME AND BANK ACCOUNT INTO WHICH THE FUNDS CAN BE PAID. PLEASE ENDEAVOUR TO RESPOND BY TELEPHONE OR FAX.
The above information will enable us write letters of claim and job description respectively. This way we will use your company's name to apply for payments and re-award the contract in your company name.We are looking forward to doing business with you and solicit your confidentiality in this transaction.
Please acknowledge receipt of this letter using the above Tel/Fax number. I will bring you into the complete picture of this pending project when I have heard from you.
Yours Faithfully,
Formerly President-VICE Richard B. Cheney
I responded once with an account on mail2world.com and then my account got suspended for supposedly sending spam.
The sample is skewed.
Responding to spam and responding to phone/internet polls are likely highly correlated traits, thus this sample is not of the general population, but of people who like responding to things.
You would figure with all the crazies on the internet (that we MUST protect our children from), that sooner or later, some hot-head with a gun and enough technical know-how to track down a spammer would start a spammer hunt and start mowing them down.
It's ONLY when we have a spammer-serial-killer that spammers will stop. Suing them doesn't work, there's a guy out there that makes a living just suing spammers in small claims court. Laws and even government crackdowns don't work. It will only be when spammers live in fear for their lives and the lives of their families that they will consider another line of work.
What's annoying is that they've gotten so adept at hiding their identities, they are probably the only people on the internet who don't get spam, furthermore, they are probably the least likely to be targeted by the govt-nannyism of the web.
All in the name of selling snake oil. PT Barnum wouldn't believe how true his law is or that it's grown by a factor of a 1000...
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I can believe the replying part, but not the buying part.
I was Joe Jobbed some years back. It was the highlight of my internet year. Seriously, it gave me giggles for a few days. I had a few "fuck off" replies but most were of the "take me off your list" type. One was from the CEO of NTL, or more likely his PA. Giggles, like I said. I responded to each email explaining what a Joe Job was, but no one replied back after that.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Pretty much everybody qualifies as a "internet user" these days, so it's not surprising that the bottom 12% are doing stupid shit. We're talking about people whose IQ is in the 80-90 range.
You'd be surprised how often people get upset about junk mail they're receiving, when in reality, they receive it because when they made a legitimate purchase a year or so previous, they left some option on the form check-marked that said "Allow us to contact you about our sales and other information."
It's also VERY often the case that once a legitimate business has your email address, they proceed to "spam" you with advertising on a regular basis, until you click someplace to opt out. Unfortunately, so many spammers provide fake 'opt out" or "unsubscribe" links these days, people are afraid to even try to use them anymore. (If it's a fake, clicking "unsubscribe" only confirms that a live human is still receiving and reading the mail they're spamming out -- so they can mark it as a "good" address to resell to others and keep using themselves.)
Lastly, I actually have been spammed by companies I never contacted before, yet they were selling legitimate products. I think that practice is pretty unethical and shady, but it happens with such places as discount cellphone accessory dealers and inkjet cartridge and laser toner discounters. Sometimes, they really *do* have pretty good deals on their products, and if you buy from them, you will receive what was advertised. I can easily see how "John Q. Public" might get such a junk mail ad, discover he can get that replacement cellphone battery for his phone for only $9 instead of the $49 the local stores are asking, and takes them up on it.
Use the Internet today. Feel smarter tomorrow!
It's more likely the most shy and/or secretive ones responding. Typically spammers are selling something people don't want to be known to purchase, and they may even be reluctant to enter an inflammatory keyword into Google. If I had any thoughts of a political career, for example, I wouldn't want any chance of an "anal intruder" search tracing back to my IP. That's not the case, I proudly get mine from Walmart.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
A friend of mine invited me to linkedin by using my personal email address and lo and behold I started getting a ton of spam relating to owning a business.
Never EVER EVER type your (or a friends') email address in to a website no matter how reputable they seem.
They will change their privacy policy the second they decide to make a buck.
And I hope the linkedin people go to hell because now that email address is about useless.
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
If you RTFA, it says that 12% of people have clicked on a spam message. It then uses the phrase "responded to" to describe what those people did.
Clicking on an email is not the same as responding to it. I've clicked on spam emails. I've never responded to one.
"Choosing to refrain from producing another person demonstrates a profound love for all life" [vhemt.org]
Would it be surprising to learn that some % of people buy shit from snail-mail spam too?
/.
If so I've lost faith in humanity, or at least
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
I always tell them I already have 12 inch dick, yet they still sending me prolongation pills spam.
cover how a brand new email account, never posted or used as a login anywhere, got spammed.
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/2008-ccs-spamalytics.pdf
The idea that 12% have responded and tried to make purchases is ridiculous. Take a look at the paper I just linked. If you scroll towards the end, you can see the results of the experiment they did. Out of about 350,000,000 e-mails they observed being sent out, they only had about 10.5K (0.00303%) actually click on the link, and of those, only 28 (well below 0.00001%) people tried to make a purchase.
Now, granted, the poll included historical data, since they asked if people had ever clicked on a link or else tried to make a purchase before, but come on. 12%? Maybe back when spam was new or something, but as another person said earlier, almost all of us are "not retarded" at this point, or at least not stupid enough to go clicking those links. I wonder what percentage of people have actually clicked on spam links in the last year, as opposed to in their lifetime...
Will I have to sew buttons to my monitors?
It's a good thing breathing is an involuntary action, cause there are a lot of people out there who'd forget to.
You know, it was the weirdest thing. For about an hour after my general anesthesia wore off (surgery...) I actually had to remind myself to breathe - felt like if I didn't do it consciously, I wouldn't do it at all. And even worse -- once I got home, I had to remind myself not to reply to spam!
Well, it also doesn't really quantify how often, or the circumstances of the responses. I mean, at one point I had my e-mail address hijacked because I entered my AOL address into a website in an email.
But that was over a decade ago, when I was about 10 years old, and had very little guidance on Internet use.
That could technically put me in the 12% (though I've never tried to buy anything) but I am no longer a child, and now know not to even click on links if I have a suspicion that the source is not what it claims to be.
Is the one developed by the hard working folks at the OpenBSD project whom have been studying spam for well over 5 years. They came up with something that is devlishly clever called OpenBSD Spamd. Spamd is basically a fake smtp engine that sets the TCP RWIN to 1. By doing this, it causes the transmission speed to slow to 1 byte per second. This can cause a backlog or even crash the spam spender. Fight back, don't filter! You can even create a serious of spam trap addresses, publish them, and reverse harvest the IP addresses of the spam senders. Check out http://www.openbsd.org/
Someone needs to make a machine that can be installed at every mall. You insert $1 and it gives you a one in one trillion chance of winning a million dollars. If you don't win, it punches you in the crotch.
Hopefully, this will speed natural selection by weeding out those likely to respond to scam offers and money can be made by selling videos of people using it to FOX.
Does that mean that a legitimate business should never send unsolicited letters and flyers in the post, and should never cold-call? These are core tools of the marketing world.
Or is email different, destroyed as a legitimate marketing communication tool by black-hat spammers?
I didn't believe you, so I checked. If you wave your hands in the air and assume that IQ is a perfect measure and that it is a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15, my calculation says that 12% of the population falls below an IQ of 83.3752 (this is according to R, the command is `qnorm(0.12, 100, 15)`, or `qnorm(0.12, mean=100, sd=15)` if you prefer clarity).
Wolfram Alpha can also come up with the answer, I'm not sure I like the form of the input (but maybe there is a clearer way; the Mathematica form on the resulting page certainly makes more sense to me, but Alpha doesn't like it):
http://www10.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Quantile+12+Normal+Distribution+100+15
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I had a 'clean' e-mail account I used often for message, signed up on boards, etc. I even posted it on a few message boards, and got little to no spam. I gave the message to a few friends, and started getting those [Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: This is Funny!] messages. My spam box exploded after this.
rose@askauntrose.com
There I dare you to spam me. I will resist the urge to join the 12%.
I submitted a rebate form to MSI. They submitted the address to multiple spam sources.
No, I'm not guessing. I got IP addresses from helpful people at a couple of the companies, and it correlates with the day they found out I was suing them for refusing to honor the rebate. So, that's one way it can happen.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I live to purchase a few thousand bucks of viagra with my credit card.
You guys should too.
It's 4111 1111 1111 1111 expires in 01/11 and the ccv is 771.
The name on the card is 'dyan gotohell'
For phishers I view the source of the submission page and build a form
with a little perl/bash script on a book from project gutenberg:
$spamSubmitUrl='http://scammer.126.com?phishing.url'; /dev/null`;
while( ) {
($f, $l, $a1, $a2, $c, $s, $z, $p, $e, $d) = @_;
$argList="?first=$f\&$last=$l&{whatever else the form needs};
`lynx -useragent="ThankYouForYourSpam" -dump "$spamsubmiturl$argList" >
}
You have to fill in some of your own stuff, but since most of the phishig sends an email, this
will fill the email scammers inbox with nifty messages.
The most I ever submitted was 2500 emails before the guy blocked my IP.
What could possibly go wrong?
Can I have a list of the 12%, I have some bridges to sell....
TFA says that 12% of e-mail users "clicked on spam". I take this to mean a URL in a spam e-mail. I'm surprised it's that low -- haven't you ever wanted to see what's on the other end of some of the weirder spams?
But does anybody actually *buy* anything from spam? Has anybody actually come out and said "Yes, I bought a fake Rolex watch from a spammer"? I'd suspect that anybody dumb enough to give a credit card to a spammer is already living in a cardboard box. Who would buy a prescription drug from somebody who can't spell it?
(I'm not talking about fraud -- there have been plenty of news reports about people falling for everything from crude 419s to elaborate phishing scams.)
In general, spam looks a lot more like a DDOS attack than marketing.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
Some of us really do need longer, firmer erections, you insensitive clod!
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Hell yes I've responded to spam. Or clicked links in emails. Or chatted to spambots. Surely any curious IT professional wants to know more about how spammers work or how far AI has come in making a profit for some lowlife. Sometimes it's just out of sheer boredom that I investigate or respond.
Here' a typical recent conversation on Skype:
Lena: Hullo!!
Lena: pretty girl looking for new friends
Me: u look like a spambot to me
Lena: Nice to meet you! How can I see Your photos and data? My photos placed at the www:***crappylinkdeleted***
Me: well that was both boring & predictable. Goodbye!
Lena: oh.... sorry... my mom comming soon... see you later!
Me: spambots don't have moms, liar!
So yeah, 12% does seem low to me too.
spam = unsolicited mail
Slashdot = Sarcasm
You underestimate the human stupidity, as usual.
At least 5% of dumbest Internet users have not responded to spam. Because they didn't know how.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I have an email account that has been riddled with lotteries and messages about my dead [some relation]'s estate. So one day when I was bored at work I started replying to them. It's lots of fun, but they always have trouble using the fake details I give them, who knew? I think they caught on though, or I'm just unlucky cause I haven't won the international lottery in months.
Later, as I caught on that clicking the link might be validating my address, I stopped that behavior and just started deleting everything.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
...to fuck with them. The Nigerian scammers can be a real hoot.
I found this out by accident looking for a roomate on cragislist. I knew the game as soon as he told me he was sending a $5000 money order and wanted me to take the first and last months rent, and forward the rest on to someone else. As if!
Anyway, the money orders were fakes (big shock) so I told him they never arrived and he sent another package with more. At which point I decided to change the game, I told him I have seen better fakes, and his were crap.
Boy did that get him hooked. He spent the next month trying to convince me to distribute packages for him, just take letters and money orders, place them in evnvelopes and send them out, he would pay me $500 a package.
Talks broke down when I insisted on payment in real US cash, up front in the package. His fakes and letters would make ok fire starter paper for the next camping trip, and scamming the scammer out of 500 would have been much funnier story.
In any case, the nigerians are great. I HIGHLY recommend fucking with them. Remember, every package of 5k in money orders they send you, is several K in profits they never get back.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Email providers should force spam filtering on their customers. This is the only way to keep those 12% dumbfucks from making spam profitable.
Now, I tend to receive a lot of spam, but the stuff that does not get deleted immediately is some of the great stories out of Nigeria. You've got your run of the mill Canadian pharmacy spam, the bank scam spam, the designer watch scam, the Viagra and their ilk spam, but the Nigerians are outright creative. Nice long stories of human suffering, or international intrigue (or both). So, though I'm not likely to respond (one was to have delivered to my front door gold bullion by armed Nigerian guards, which if it was real would simply have me sign, shoot me, and make off with the gold) but they're at least fun to read!