The People Who Respond To Spam

from the another-batch dept

It's been pointed out over and over again that if no one ever bought from spam, there wouldn't be much of a need for it. However, the people keep buying and everyone else keeps suffering. Back in March, we wrote about one of the first articles that ever tracked down someone who would admit (happily) to buying from spam, but he obviously wasn't the only one. Following a recent study suggesting that an awful lot of people buy from spam, USA Today has managed to track down a few of the people who keep spammers happy and keep the rest of us miserable. The list even includes a "computer book author," Robert Reinhardt, who says "spam can be useful," (if you're wondering, he appears to write books on Macromedia Flash) and a "computer consultant," Michael Breindel, who says he not only buys from spam, but uses it to promote his own business. From the look of his website, of course, this "computer consultant" hasn't yet figured out how to de-moronize his website for non-IE browsers, since it's full of non-ASCII characters that make the site look, well, almost like spam.
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  • identicon
    Oliver Wendell Jones, 27 Jul 2004 @ 11:02am

    New Government Agency...

    Perhaps under the authority of the FCC...

    They send out spam for outrageoulsy unbelievable products and then wait for people to try and order them.

    They then dispatch emergency response vehicles to the idiot's location and proceed to drag the person out into the street, strip them naked and then tattoo the words "I am an idiot who buys items advertised in spam!" all over their body while simultaneously burning their house to the ground and salting the ground around the ashes as a lesson to others.

    OK, so it might be a tiny bit extreme, but who's really going to object?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    D G, 27 Jul 2004 @ 2:07pm

    How about a set of Rules

    How about a Ten Commandments for ‘surfing

    1. Thou shalt not respond to SPAM
    2. Thou shalt remember commandment No. 1
    3. ......

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 28 Jul 2004 @ 7:30am

    Sign them up for more spam

    Since they like spam so much, why not just sign them up for more spam.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Adam, 28 Jul 2004 @ 10:06am

      Re: Sign them up for more spam

      I would just like to commend Mike for introducing me to the word "de-moronize". Classic!!

      link to this | view in chronology ]


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