From: Christian Weisgerber (naddy@mips.inka.de)
Date: Tue Oct 01 2002 - 20:58:00 MDT
Damien Broderick <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> So why do they get sent? Someone is paying for this `service'.
> What in dog's name are they getting in return?
Money.
1. Spam works.
2. People think it works.
Strictly speaking, UBE (unsolicited bulk e-mail, "spam") doesn't
actually have to work. It suffices if you can find gullible customers
who pay you for sending the crap. However, I'm inclined to believe
that some spam actually works. It is very inexpensive per message,
and if you hit one sucker out of a 1000 targets, you'll make lots
of money.
I don't examine the spam I get too closely--and even if I wanted
to and figured out how to display it I still couldn't read a lot
of it because it is in languages I don't know--but my impression
is that a lot of it falls into one of these categories:
1. Ads for spam itself: address lists, spam sending programs.
Clearly the fact that you just received this piece of spam proves
that it works! This probably impresses a few sales people who'll
spend money to jump on this new and exciting marketing method--only
to learn later on that it is also an excellent way to lose your
Internet connectivity and destroy any good reputation you may
have had. I suspect that most of the more bizarre cases (such
as a spam advertising industrial quantitites of sodium hydrosulfite)
that don't fit any of the categories here originate that way.
2. Paid pornography.
There always is a huge demand for porn. I recently talked to a
guy who earns some of his money doing the underlying tech work
for porn pay sites, and he said the demand is enormous and the
business is real good despite there being no shortage of free
porn on the net.
3. Seedy products that claim to address various self-esteem and
sexual dysfunction issues: baldness cures, shoes that make you
look taller, potions against impotence, libido enhancers, growing
your penis or breasts, weight loss pills, age reversal, you name
it. These have been around in the ad sections of pulp publications
for decades which suggests that yes, there *is* a market for the
"terminally lonely or stupid".
4. Outright fraud.
Advertising any of the above, in particular porn, together with
a simple dummy site is reputed to be an excellent way to collect
credit card numbers from would-be customers. I would expect the
offenders not to abuse that information personally but to sell
it at a commission, making it hard to prove a connection. Then
there is that Nigerian money scam, pyramid schemes, etc, all of
which we have seen in the offline world for decades.
In summary, the spam flood is largely due to the combination of its
extreme cheapness for reaching large numbers of people and a multitude
of tried-and-true ways of preying on the gullible.
-- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de
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