The Economics Of Spamming

Shardleton writes "What kind of an idiot would buy penis-enlargement pills? Even more idiotic, who would buy them from a spammer? Apparently LOTS of people, according to this article at Wired. The operators of a spamvertised order site left their customer logs exposed. There were 6,000 orders for the pills since July 4. Sayeth Wired: "Do the math and you begin to understand why spammers are willing to put up with the wrath of spam recipients, Internet service providers and federal regulators.""

And they don't even have to sell anything

Another interesting viewpoint can be found in this article [washtimes.com] which points out that spammers don't even have to sell anything to make money. They mention a number of schemes:

Offering e-mail recipients "free pornography" if they download a software program. The program often provides the pornography, but only after the user's computer dials a 1-900 number to an overseas location, racking up hundreds of dollars in phone charges.

"Pump and dump" stock schemes, in which a spammer sends e-mails touting a certain stock and encourages people to buy it. The stock's value goes up, and spammers sell it at a profit.

Accepting payment for an item without sending it. Spammers bet that someone buying Viagra or pills for the enlargement of body parts would be too embarrassed to call the police or Better Business Bureau.

Of course, if there was ever need for proof that there's a sucker born every minute, just check out this quote from the Wired article:

There was a picture on the top of the page that said, 'As Seen on TV,' and I guess that made me think it was legit.

John.

Re:And they don't even have to sell anything

even more amazing is a coherent FP

Re:sh!t

Hehe. I always thought, that crap does not work. Their ripping the customer off. But then I saw the diabolicalness of the whole thing.

"Make your penis HUGE"

The penis reducing pills start at $1000...

Re:And they don't even have to sell anything

Accepting payment for an item without sending it. Spammers bet that someone buying Viagra or pills for the enlargement of body parts would be too embarrassed to call the police or Better Business Bureau.

The last reminds me of a scheme a friend and I cooked up in high school, which seemed completely legal to us.

Sell through magazine ads (ok no internet then, just modify for the times) a subscription/package of some pornos, nothing special, maybe just your usual college-girls-gone-wild stuff, for a lower-than-usual price, like 5 or 10 bucks.

Now, you collect a ton of money, then to everyone who sent you cash, you mail them back a letter, explaining that for (whatever reason) you cannot send them the porno they ordered, and you enclose a refund cheque for the full amount.

The catch is, you name you company "Scat-Fetish-Jizz-Gobbler Corporation", or something really sick and embarassing.

You bank on the fact that most people wouldnt suffer the embarassment of facing the bank teller for 5 or 10 bucks.

But you're in the clear - after all you did refund their money.

This was back before ubiquitous ATMs and online payments and all that jazz.

Re:And they don't even have to sell anything

Wow! And you and your friend cooked this up [snopes.com] all on your own in high school?

-T

Re:And they don't even have to sell anything

"Homer, that was an episode of Happy Days!"

Re:Richard Feynman had to share his Nobel

Well in my day we had pencils, paper, slide rules and APL. Shame that IBM effectively killed it by taking it propriatary.

Ah, the good old days of waking up, eating a cold lump of poison, going to work in mine. . .

Ummmmmm, nevermind.

Feynman was always highly visually oriented. It seems almost natural that he would have developed both useful and unique methods of notation. I'm not sure the current state of academia is suitable for the development of his like. In fact I'm not sure the state of academia at the time was suitable for the development of his like and he really got a bit lucky with the Manhatten project. Luck that benefited us all.

KFG

Lame info schemes

A friend and I actually DID go through with a make money fast scheme. Back in '92 when the Internet was really starting to get buzz, we put an add in Popular Science promsing "Valuable information on the Internet just $10" or something similarly hyped. What they got was some photocopied BS we downloaded ourselves; we even reduced it and double-side copied it to keep our costs down.

We figured it was totally legit since, if you read our ad carefully, we did provide exactly what we promised.

I think we got about 10 requests, which we fulfilled, and we ended up basically breaking even or even losing money.

My new business plan!

Variation: subscription service for intelligence improvement pills. Charge $9.95 for a month's supply. When you get smart enough to stop sending me $9.95 a month for sugar pills I have proof that they obviously worked.

Re:My new business plan!

When you get smart enough to stop sending me $9.95 a month for sugar pills I have proof that they obviously worked.

That's an ancient Jewish joke...

On a train in czarist Russia, a Jew is eating a whitefish wrapped in paper. A man sitting across the aisle begins to taunt him. Finally, he asks: What makes you Jews so smart?" "All right," replies the Jew. "I guess I'll have to tell you. It's because we eat the heads of whitefish." "Well if that's the secret," the man says, then I can be as smart as you are." "That's right," says the Jew, "and in fact I have an extra whitefish head with me. You can have it for five kopecks." The man pays for the fish head and begins to eat it.

An hour later, the train stops at a station for a few minutes. The man leaves the train and then comes back. "Listen, " he says, "you sold me that whitefish head for five kopecks but I just saw a wholewhitefish at the market for three kopecks." "See," replies the Jew, "you're getting smarter already."

Re:And they don't even have to sell anything

Courtesy of IMDB, from Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels [imdb.com]:

Listen to this one then; you open a company called the Arse Tickler's Faggot Fan Club. You take an advert in the back page of some gay mag, advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos, sell it a bit with, er . . . I dunno, "does what no other dildo can do until now", latest and greatest in sexual technology. Guaranteed results or money back, all that bollocks. These dills cost twenty-five each; a snip for all the pleasure they are going to give the recipients. They send a cheque to the company name, nothing offensive, er, Bobbie's Bits or something, for twenty-five. You put these in the bank for two weeks and let them clear. Now this is the clever bit. Then you send back the cheques for twenty-five pounds from the real company name, Arse Tickler's Faggot Fan Club, saying sorry, we couldn't get the supply from America, they have sold out. Now you see how many of the people cash those cheques; not a single soul, because who wants his bank manager to know he tickles arses when he is not paying in cheques!

Re:And they don't even have to sell anything

Ideas don;t come from only one place necessarily. That's a complete infofascist myth - it's completely possible for multiple people to independently have essentially the same idea. That's why it should be clear to someone willing to apply a moment's logical thought that patents are about control, not innovation.

a guess

Maybe they work?

Re:a guess

You HAVE to be kidding.

You could sell a canned vacuum this way. Enough people will bite at a product if it is marketed correctly.

Look at the "pet rocks" that sold in the 70's.

Re:a guess

"Look at the "pet rocks" that sold in the 70's."

I'd have to say you missed the point of the Pet Rock. The product was actually the (moderately) funny book that came with the rock.

Yours came with a book?

Crap.

Uh-oh

There's now going to be about 6,000 very embarrassed men if these logs remain accessible.

Re:Uh-oh

They were ordering for a friend

Re:Uh-oh

>>They were ordering for a friend

And being involved in your "friend's" erectile dysfunction is somehow LESS embarassing?

Hmmm...

MadCow

Re:Uh-oh

I don't know about that, the number seems to be down to only 404.

Always wondered...

... I had always wondered if anyone would actually buy from a spammer.

Any chance the spammer did a media honeypot? Released fake records to make marketers *think* he was successful?

Re:Always wondered...

Actually, they're called a honeytokens [slashdot.org]. Good point.

Computers are getting too easy to use

I always thought that people gullible/uneducated enough to fall for spam would also be too uneducated to run a computer well enough to handle the email in the first place.

Guess we've done too good a job of making them easy to use...

Public Disgrace!!

Ok, reading the article and following a couple links - here's the penis pill spammer!

Braden Bournival
561 Montgomery. St, Manchester, NH 03102
Tel. #: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]

Do whatever you want with this info but don't blame ME!!!

And one from Canada

Tim Campbell
1235 George Ave.
Windsor, Ontario
Canada
N8Y 2X6
TEL#:[phone]

Re:Public Disgrace!!

Because they are actually delivering the pills, they aren't breaking the laws. It's legitimate advertising, kinda. I mean, you take the pill, see attractive member of the preferred sex, and your penis enlarges by many inches.

Because of weird legal loopholes, spammers can legitimately email you by way of lists they got from other companies that once got your email because you agreed to let them sell it when you clicked "OK" without reading the entirety of the 5 page privacy policy.

Re:Public Disgrace!!

"There have got to be some laws these guys are breaking. Why does not the police or government get these guys?"

RTFA. The FTC says there is no proof that these things work but it does not have the resources to follow up. I guess there are bigger fish to fry.

Btw, it also says that the guy has a strange sense of ethics and honoured all refund requests. He's also a national-level expert chess player.

Ooh

What kind of an idiot would buy penis-enlargement pills?
Meeeeeeeeeee :(

Re:who would buy?

"an idiot with a small penis "

Aren't you glad Slashdot lets you post anonymously? :)

The problem that just won't go away.

My Hotmail account has been filling up regularly with spam like this for years, and I always wondered not only who the hell would buy something like this from someone they didn't know but also why people who are dumping hundreds of thousands of messages an hour through a network aren't having their connections terminated. You know the drill; everybody's got an abuse policy, but apparently [e-mail] is routed to the Recycle Bin.

Despite my vehement loathing of spam, a recent incident is making me question how we go about dealing with it. Recently, Something Awful has been having issues with the SPEWS list, a popular spam blacklister, who according [somethingawful.com] to Something Awful [somethingawful.com] blacklisted a whole chunk of IP addresses that happened to include their own unabused server without offering recourse or explanation simply because it had the misfortune of sharing address space unknowingly and unwillingly. I'd call that overkill, and more offensive than the perceived problem of spam itself if truth be told. Bayesian filters [python.net] work, so why do we need to continue inadvertently censoring netizens who have nothing to do with spamming?

I tell you, folks, after reading this article and hearing about what anti-spam proponents have come up with for solutions, I'm starting to have second thoughts about the whole deal. For me it comes down to to the freedom of speech issue -- I've always been told that if you can't handle free speech you don't agree with you obviously can't handle free speech -- and I suppose just because something irritates me doesn't mean that the greater good would be served by silencing that something.

Another perspective is that the amount of money being pumped back into the economy by so-called unsolicited commercial e-mail is nothing to scoff at, and perhaps legislating it in some tolerable form such as limiting a company to one commercial message per person per day would create a new legitimate business method in this country. It's something to think about, certainly. I'd hate to think we're going to lose another revenue stream to outsourcing before we've even had a chance to give it a go locally, and this may be a way for us to recapture some of those IT jobs that have been lost and generate a whole new crop of successful entrepeneurships.

Re:The problem that just won't go away.

For me it comes down to to the freedom of speech issue -- I've always been told that if you can't handle free speech you don't agree with you obviously can't handle free speech -- and I suppose just because something irritates me doesn't mean that the greater good would be served by silencing that something.


Admittedly, I didn't RTFA.. But, as someone who is vehement about free speech myself I can tell you that I don't consider SPAM as free speech. It's not free speech if you have no way to avoid it. Sure, if I don't like what someone's saying on TV, I can change the channel. I don't have the option of 'changing the channel' on a spammer.

I agree, everyone should have the right to speak their mind, no matter how unpopular or controversial. However, no one has the right to force anyone else to read, listen to, or otherwise hold captive an audience - and thats exactly what spammers are doing.

And don't tell me I can simply hit the delete button - thats not something I should have to do. Just like if someone's making harassing phonecalls to me, I can call the police and press charges. There needs to be a similar mechanism for SPAM, preferrably something involving rope, stakes, honey and a mound of Texas fireants.

Logic is fleeting

In principle, I agree with you. But, on the one hand, you argue that

if I don't like what someone's saying on TV, I can change the channel

implying that speech on television is "free speech" (since you have a way to avoid it). However, when refering to email, you write

don't tell me I can simply hit the delete button - thats not something I should have to do.

Does this imply that you shouldn't have to pick up the remote control and change the channel -- that the television should just read your mind? After all, in both cases (watching television and reading email) you are choosing to do so, and you are choosing to focus on a single instance (channel or particular email). If you don't like that particular instance, you either (a) change instances by using the remote control or the next/delete button, or (b) change mediums by turning the television or the email application off.

What's the difference again? Like I said, I agree with you in principle, but your logical argument here on what constitutes "free speech" is weak.

Re:The problem that just won't go away.

First, the "money pumped back into the economy" statement. You think that the customers would have burnt that, or put it in their matress if they hadn't bought swedish-made penis pumps? I doubt it. They'd have bought the next product advertised on the shopping network, or sold at the checkout at Walmart.

Second, the "free speech" issue. If you lie to my employees to get them to stamp your mail with my bulk-mailing code it's not free speech, it's fraud. I won't shut you down because of what your mail says, but because you want me to foot the bill for it. Also, your right to free speech doesn't obligate me to listen. If you have to lie about the subject and sender to get people to listen, it's likely they don't want to hear you.

Re:The problem that just won't go away.

SA uses CogentCo to host their servers. CogentCo is a cesspool of spammers. Anyone that does business with CogentCo deserves to have all of their email blocked by every router on the internet. The fact that CogentCo allows spammers to operate freely on their network and does ZERO to stop them is reason enough to blacklist CogentCo. SPEW has blacklisted thousands of spammers hosted at CogentCo, some of them dozens of times using different IPs. CogentCo gives these spammers new IPs every time. The only way to combat this is to blacklist CogentCo's entire block.

"For me it comes down to to the freedom of speech issue -"
You can say whatever the fuck you want, but not in a manner in which I have to pay for it.

Re:The problem that just won't go away.

Sorry, Sheetrock, you're completely wrong with your solution to spam. It's not a freedom of speech issue any more than shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre is a freedom of speech issue. How about the freedom to not have to listen? If you were to restrict each spmmer to one spam per person per day, you'd still end up with an inbox full of spam. There are 6 billion people on this planet. If only a 1000 of them were spammers - that's still 1000 items of spam a day.

The Bayesian filter is only a stopgap as well. The spam still gets sent, clogging up mail servers and a whole load of bandwidth. The only long term solution is to stop spam at source, and I don't really have an answer how to do that.

There are a few suggestions:
1) Dump SMTP. Replace it with a secure version that doesn't allow spammers to hide behind an anonymous address.
2) Make spamming illegal, punishable by large fines, and *enforce it*
3) Authorities need to recognise spam as a seriousproblem and deal with it. If someone sent out a destructive virus, it would take the FBI about 2 days to track them down. The same approach needs to be taken with spam.
4) Make it an offence to *buy* from a spammer. Call it an accessory to a crime, or something.

Re:The problem that just won't go away.

Your right to free speech does not obligate me, as a private citizen, to provide you a forum in which to exercise that right.

Thus, a spammer's free speech rights have no bearing on my inbox.