Is there money in spamming?

Rabies

The Register

The man - named only as Mr X - used 600-700 compromised PCs to send about nine billion spam messages promoting penis pills, pornographic websites and other assorted tat. X's 14-month junk mail campaign reportedly earned him an estimated € 40,000 before he was collared in November 2005.
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In mitigation, X argued that he had stopped spamming by the time he was arrested - not because he realised his activities were wrong, but because he "simply wasn't earning enough money"

Nine billion spam emails sent out in 14 months and only E40k made in return. Not really high earning now is it. I would have expected more.

Lump

Still it's €40,000 though!

John

Kwekubo

It's enough compensation for sitting on your backside in front of a computer, sending out malware to randomers now and then.

GBX

but surely all things considered ... the cost of equipment, net fees, software, electricity etc wouldnt make much of a profit.

humbert

he was prob working from a pc and an internet connection no better than yours though. nice little side earner!

Rabies

A side earner is all it could be. It is not something that is going to make you a millionare.

irlirishkev

If I met one of these f*ckers responsible for spamming, I think I'd kill them. Seriously. I think I'd kill them!

ChRoMe

Exact figures are difficult to get but estimations put the spamming industry worth at around 5 billion.

phantom_lord

irlirishkev wrote:

If I met one of these f*ckers responsible for spamming, I think I'd kill them. Seriously. I think I'd kill them!

.

DonkeyStyle \o/

GBX wrote:

but surely all things considered ... the cost of equipment, net fees, software, electricity etc wouldnt make much of a profit.

Well considering he used other peoples equipment remotely (ie "compromised PCs") to send his spam, I doubt the running costs were any higher for him than normal.

Max_Damage

This maybe a stupid question, but how exactly do they make the money in return from sending a load of crap e-mails out?

phantom_lord

Max_Damage wrote:

This maybe a stupid question, but how exactly do they make the money in return from sending a load of crap e-mails out?

I'd imagine it;s from people buying the stuff he advertises.

Max_Damage

phantom_lord wrote:

I'd imagine it;s from people buying the stuff he advertises.

I never thought people could be that stupid.

Black Swan

humbert wrote:

he was prob working from a pc and an internet connection no better than yours though. nice little side earner!

Naaaaa, he was probably sitting in his car immediately outside a free hotspot on his laptop with no connection fees. Or wardrived around until he found someone's wi fi without password protection?

ZygOte

irlirishkev wrote:

If I met one of these f*ckers responsible for spamming, I think I'd kill them. Seriously. I think I'd kill them!

can i help? , ill bring my spoon. evil spammers grrrrrrrrrrr

ChRoMe

phantom_lord wrote:

I'd imagine it;s from people buying the stuff he advertises.

No the spammer is paid by the companys who he advertises on behalf of. Also dont underestimate the general population. If a spammer sends millions of emails a tiny percentage of sales (I'd imagine even less than 1% would make it worthwhile).

Look at it this way if there was no money in it people wouldnt do it.

seamus

It only takes a handful (literally) of those 9 billion mails to net the companies involved some money.

If he's making €40k out of 9Bn messages, then that's 0.000005c per message. A company can send out 1 million messages through this guy for around a fiver. They'll easily get at least one sucker out of that million who'll hand them €50. Sounds like good economics to me.

Some spammers do (or at least used to) make good money out of this. It would get them big houses, nice cars, and what can only be described as a small data centre in their basements for sending out this mail. Now of course they can use zombies to massively reduce their overheads.

What this guy was running is probably something that could have been run on the side. I could certainly do with €40k extra on top of my salary, and he probably just had to check his systems each evening and do some tweaking here and there.

I would suspect though that the spam market is getting less and less lucrative. Modern spam filtering has caused spammers to have to make their mails less and less legible. Half of the time you haven't a clue what they're trying to sell. This would easily have a massive impact on their ability to rope in suckers.

smemon

there's big money in it.

common emails aren't as attractive anymore for advertisers or spammers simply because most of the major email providers have inbuilt spam filters.

so what's hot now? MySpace, Bebo, adsense/adwords arbitrage...

Believe it or not, people buold up thousand of friends on myspace (sometimes hundreds of thousands) and then sell their account for €€€'s, as bulletins can be sent to all of their friends on that account.

Exact same with bebo.

arbitrage is a clever, sophisticated form of spamming.. it basically involves taking advantage of people's inability to spell properly (and as you'll know from these boards, thats a lot of people )

you advertise on adwords for 'heidi clum' ads, for next to nothing... then sell 'heidi klum ' ads on your site for 10 times the amount you bought them for...

it's a fine art, and one i've studied for a while

it's hard work though, spammers need to be constantly producing, constantly moving... constantly building in order to make a living.

Capt'n Midnight

I can't find the links ( have a look at http://www.theregister.co.uk ) but IIRC ~7% of american net users have bought something from an unsolicited email and the break even point is about one bite per 30 million emails.

Prison Sentencing - one second per email they send or email address they sell. Seriously until some of these people are killed or spend life in prison, there is no incentive for them to stop. Many are repeat offenders fines and short prison sentences having no effect.

Isn't killing harsh ?
Tell that to the people who have died because the economic cost of spam prevented healthcare investment and waste of health care professionals and others time and the greater waste of resources in preventing it. Mainly due to peoples fear of using the net spam ( in the generic sense of botnets and other exploits that are financially worthwhile becasue of funding of spam ) Billions are wasted on paper transactions and on middlemen.

The receiver of stolen goods is also a criminal. So lets do the same to spam - if you buy something from an unsolicited email then it can be confiscated from you.

A company director can get a fine of €127,000 for having dodgy software, as can a person with a cameraphone in the cinema or someone taking a wrong turn in the airport. These are the sort of fines you can apply to companies who engage spammers.

The most valuable rescource most of us have is time.

Capt'n Midnight

I can't find the links ( have a look at http://www.theregister.co.uk ) but IIRC ~7% of american net users have bought something from an unsolicited email and the break even point is about one bite per 30 million emails.

Prison Sentencing - one second per email they send or email address they sell. Seriously until some of these people are killed or spend life in prison, there is no incentive for them to stop. Many are repeat offenders fines and short prison sentences having no effect.

Isn't killing harsh ?
Tell that to the people who have died because the economic cost of spam prevented healthcare investment and waste of health care professionals and others time and the greater waste of resources in preventing it. Mainly due to peoples fear of using the net spam ( in the generic sense of botnets and other exploits that are financially worthwhile becasue of funding of spam ) Billions are wasted on paper transactions and on middlemen.

The receiver of stolen goods is also a criminal. So lets do the same to spam - if you buy something from an unsolicited email then it can be confiscated from you.

A company director can get a fine of €127,000 for having dodgy software, as can a person with a cameraphone in the cinema or someone taking a wrong turn in the airport. These are the sort of fines you can apply to companies who engage spammers.

The most valuable rescource most of us have is time.

Victor

smemon wrote:

you advertise on adwords for 'heidi clum' ads, for next to nothing... then sell 'heidi klum ' ads on your site for 10 times the amount you bought them for...

You should see how many hits Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation get. Their website: http://www.utube.com/pdf/utube-comments3.pdf

Max_Damage wrote:

I never thought people could be that stupid.

Humans are intelligent, people are stupid.

RadioActive

I thought it was 4% of people, but I believe 7% have purchased something from spam. If we could get rid of those people we'd have no problem. I'm surprised though you couldn't make more than that from sending nine billion.

zuutroy

I read somewhere that most of them operate on a one in a million purchase model. Personally, I think thats optimistic!

rogue-entity

Most of the worlds spammers themselves are located in countries like Russia and Eastern Europe as well as the US. Perhaps if AT&T and other Tier-1 owners decide to threaten these countries internet access unless they track down and arrest the spammers. Even if the spammers are using compromised PC's, that violates computer crime law in most countries. If AT&T and their ilk decided to stop all data traffic to and from these countries from passing along their networks, then these countries could lose their internet connectivity.

Though, most spam is sent from compromised computers, all running windows, suggests that more people need to be educated into running Anti-Malware, and ISPs should block outgoing connections to Port 25 (except to their own servers). Thus cutting off the ability of most systems to send out junk mail.