Making A Living Spamming - Might Be Getting Tougher
from the yeah,-right dept
Because there just haven't been enough "profile of a spammer" articles written by the press already, here's yet another one that goes on and on about how much money all those spammers are making. Why is it that no one ever questions these numbers? Spammers aren't known for being the most trustworthy of sources. However, this article does bring up the issue that for spammers to make money, someone's gotta be buying this stuff (even if many spammers make their money from selling lists - at some point, somewhere, someone's gotta buy for it to all be worthwhile). While we recently had a story on one such guy, you still wonder just how many of those guys there are. The article linked above says that spammers see about an 8% response rate - which sounds ridiculously high to me. Of course, I travel in circles where people tend to know better. However, Ed Felten has a theory that the latest spam stats indicate that people are finally wising up. Fewer people are responding to spam, and fewer people are buying from spam. He's hoping that as internet users get a bit more savvy, those numbers should continue to decrease.
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When will
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When will dorpus stop sniffing glue ?
... as soon as you dorpus send them each a wireless laptop & pollute their barren wasteland of Sally Struthersness with hotspots aplenty ...
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Increase...not decrease
Use the sick logic these morons use, if sending 10 million emails a day netted them 8% in sucker response for a while, then it drops by half...they won't think "awww, well this business sucks now, I'll cut back and do something useful!" they'll think "well if I'm only getting half what i used to, then sending out twice as much will net me the money I want to be making..."
Hence he'll send out 20 million, even 30 million if he can.
These people are scum...
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Re: Increase...not decrease
Maybe. The spammers may just start relying more on outdated lists, without knowing or caring that their spam isn't even being delivered.
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No Subject Given
Maybe the whole thing is just a big pyramid scheme and no one is really buying anything except spam lists and spam software.
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