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Former Spammer Reveals Secrets in New Book
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jul 20, 2007 10:50 AM
from the sleeps-better-on-his-bed-of-royalties dept.
from the sleeps-better-on-his-bed-of-royalties dept.
StonyandCher writes "A retired spammer is looking to make money from a tell-all book rather than fleecing people dependent on pharmaceuticals and people with gambling problems. In this Computerworld article 'Ed', a retired spammer, predicts the spam problem will only get worse, aided by consumers with dependencies and faster broadband speeds. From the article: 'He sent spam to recovering gambling addicts enticing them to gambling Web sites. He used e-mail addresses of people known to have bought antianxiety medication or antidepressants and targeted them with pharmaceutical spam. Response rates to spam tend to be a fraction of 1 percent. But Ed said he once got a 30 percent response rate for a campaign. The product? A niche type of adult entertainment: photos of fully clothed women popping balloons ... "Yes, I know I'm going to hell," said Ed."
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Let me guess... (Score:5, Funny)
Earn thousands with ads like this one (Score:5, Funny)
This was an actual ad that frequently ran in the national enquirer
Parent
Re:Let me guess... (Score:5, Funny)
Of course it doesn't go down well, it's enlarged. Sheesh.
Parent
One Percent With No Communication Cost! (Score:5, Interesting)
I work with targeted communications and our success rates with similar lists are just as "successful". We were looking to contact Juniors and Seniors in HS to let them know of our offerings and had a list that supposedly contained names and addresses (no e-mail/phone) of people that would be in this demographic. Out of 9800 people we had a 0.93% response rate. Being that the cost of that list was as low as it was we will do it again...
I can only imagine what an advantage it is having such a low communication cost (it costs us
Re:One Percent With No Communication Cost! (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it very telling that there's very little of the usual
It's clearly okay for corporations to collect and maintain detailed records of individual consumer preferences, financial records and medical records. And yet, when identity theft stories appear, there is the usual hue and cry "something must be done!"
It seems to me that few people understand the two go together like beer and potato chips.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, I'm failing to see why sending snail mail spam is ok, but email and SMS spam, unsolicited telephone marketting, etc are bad.
Direct sales, no matter what the form, are a Bad Thing - they are an invasion of my privacy and make me go to some effort (whether that effort be answering the phone and telling someone to get lost, deleting spam emails or taking spam snail mail to the recycling bin).
Infact, snail mail spam is also
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1. It comes in once a day, and I can sort it in a few seconds, as opposed to trickling in all day long and distracting me.
2. Since it has significant costs to send, it is almost never as blatantly stupid as most of the spam emails I get.
3. Since the post office does investigate mail fraud (at least in the US), most of the offers may be stupid, but
Re:One Percent With No Communication Cost! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, I'm failing to see why sending snail mail spam is ok, but email and SMS spam, unsolicited telephone marketting, etc are bad.
Yes, yes you are. Let me break it down, since you're actually speaking of three things here:
In short, people put up with junk mail because it doesn't cost them anything, only saps a couple of minutes of time once a day (at most!), and isn't particularly annoying.
People don't like e-mail and SMS spam because it costs them something, is very annoying, is often fradulent, and takes time and effort to deal with almost every time one checks one's mail. Likewise, telemarketing is very annoying.
Parent
Paid in CASH?! (Score:5, Insightful)
photos of fully clothed women popping balloons (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Rule #1 - spammers lie. (Score:3, Insightful)
a. That was an EXTREMELY targeted spam run. In which case, WHERE did he get the email addresses?
b. Considering that there are usually a few million emails sent out in a spam run, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people who responded to that.
Neither one makes much sense to me. Oh, that's right. Rule #1 - spammers lie.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Only plausible source: (Score:3)
Maybe it was the email database from a softcore porn site that specializes in fully-clothed women popping balloons?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not my Church. (Score:4, Funny)
brought to you by the local morality guide.
Parent
Re:Not my Church. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:photos of fully clothed women popping balloons (Score:4, Informative)
Who knew? Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go wash my cache out with soap.
Parent
Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
I've never gotten such spam.
I'm surprised it was only 30% -- that kind of thing is bound to pique the interest of a whole lotta people.
(Oh, come on, admit it, you're googling it right now, aren't you? Oh, maybe I'm going to hell too
Cheers
Actually... (Score:2)
Re: Actually... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
How do you know? Do you actually read all your spam?
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
(/user looks up from bubble wrap section)
I (pop) haven't either (pop) but, honestly, (pop!pop!) have no interest in the (pop!pop!pop!pop!) subject.
Now, clad in bubblewrap (pop), and the eventual popping (pop!pop!) is another subject (pop!pop!).
Parent
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, oddball question time. Using the above quote, yes, only a man can stick his equipment inside the balloon. However, what about the reverse? Sticking the balloon inside a woman and GENTLY inflating and deflating it again and again.
I know, I know, I'm a sick puppy. Aren't we all in some manner?
Parent
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Interesting)
I've always thought trying to figure out the root cause for a fetish is kinda pointless unless someone has a really strong obsession which interferes with their normal life and they need clinical care.
Sure, some people probably do have some fetishes which start out with some kind of Freudian-explainable experience. But, you don't need to rely on a man who used a lot of cocaine and figured everything revolved around how you were potty trained, and how badly you wanted to sleep with/kill your mother to determine why someone might do something for their own pleasure.
Nowadays, fetishes are so easy to find information on (like, say, a Slashdot article
Lets face it, go to an adult store and they've got all of the fixin's for fetish play just sitting there. You could just one day decide to try one of them out. Spot a video and decide to watch it. Or, possibly, a partner will suggest it one day just for fun.
Fetishes don't need to be just irrational/compulsive obsessions any more. They can be conscious decisions that you stumble upon and decide will just be damned fun. As Freud himself said
I for one welcome our fully clothed, balloon-popping female overlords.
Cheers
Parent
Sod the spammer, how about the sources of his info (Score:5, Insightful)
Some companies dealing with confidential information clearly have been passing on this information.
This guy should be forced to disclose where he got the information from, so that these companies can be punished for poor data security, or worse, actually selling such sensitive private information on.
I also believe that there are laws against the exploitation of vulnerable people, but they're probably next to useless, and poorly defined (or specifically defined, so won't apply to X because it only mentions Y).
Re:Sod the spammer, how about the sources of his i (Score:3, Insightful)
Jeeze! It is too simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Jeeze! It is too simple (Score:5, Insightful)
If a system encourages the exploitation of weakness, is it in the best interest of the weak to support such a system?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is more immoral or unethical? Buying or selling?
I don't think it's always useful to make such distinctions. We in the west tend to apply reductionist thought patterns to systems analysis problems, and it doesn't work. We can't just pick an arbitrary point in a system and say, "that's our problem, right there!" We need to look at patterns & feedback loops.
In this case, you choose to isolate and morally condemn the demand side of the equation as if it had no interaction with the supply side. The idea that everyone is solely responsible for their acti
wtf?! (Score:2)
fully clothed in what? nurses uniforms? fettish gear? rubber? a gimp suit?
popping ballons?! no sir, that is too much. is this some kind of freudian thing?
my mind boggles.
Re:A Gimp Suit ?!? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
I don't believe in an afterlife... (Score:5, Funny)
ob ATHF (Score:4, Funny)
http://www.vimeo.com/78881 [vimeo.com]
Re: (Score:2)
But yes. very applicable. (make the homies say ho, and the girlies wanna SCREAM!)
Good news (Score:3, Insightful)
It is like those get rich quick schemes on paid TV. If it were so easy, then why is the promoter not making the million dollars a week instead of making cheesy commercials. If I made a million a week for a year, I certainly would not be on TV telling everyone about it, at the risk of reducing my real profit opportuities. I would hiding out in my fortress of richness and enjoying the money.
This also reinforces my assumption that for the most part spamming is just a way to make some easy money without much real work. Most people are not going to get rich off it, but if one is a country where a few thousand a year is good money, then hey, it beats doing honest work. It might even product the 20K a year one needs to live in the US. But like any organized crime, a few get insanely rich, and the rest get knocked off for pocket change.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Take the "Make millions in real estate" category. It works... in fact, it's so rock-stupidly simple that TLC has shows about it now with people who really have no business in real estate somehow managing not to lose money. Sure, most of those people are only making $100K-$200K per year at it, but they don't do it for a living.
So, why don't these millionaire-author guys keep doing it? Because
Re:Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
- a clean email list - cleaning an email list requires sending an email and not receiving a bounce. There is risk in testing the email because if you test too many bad ones you can get blocked, but once it's tested it's worth considerably more than an unclean email.
- list of active users - users who opened or clicked. An order of magnitude more valuable than a clean email.
- relationships - avoiding email blocks and getting unblocked
- distributed servers - avoid email blocks by sending from and rotating multiple IPs. The more you have, the more stable the delivery is.
- delivery - your email has to make it to the inbox. An order of magnitude more valuable than Bulk box delivery. Bulk delivery is still better than no delivery, which can be the case if you're blocked.
If you have all those factors in your favor, you can sustain the profits, which is what the major "legitimate" commercial emailers do. The true spammers are usually a bit more shitty, using trojans and disposable accounts, but achieve the same effect, usually at the cost of the ISP, however they're risking jail time if they're caught.Parent
Strange ending to the Summary... (Score:3, Interesting)
This seems like the least objectionable use of spam. There seem to be three problems with spam.
First, truely evil spam that contains malware, fraudulent offers, or other things that people might call the police about if it arrived via snail-mail (I'm assuming the adult entertainment site was just pornography and not malware infested).
Second, that the spammer uses botnets to accomplish his goal, which is to hid his operation because of spam-filtering/laws etc (I'm assuming the botnet is just for anonimity, as a huge e-mail server shouldn't be that costly to run.)
Finally, that we are diluged in 3,000-1,000,000 e-mails a day for crap we don't want. But a 30% success rate means that the ads were fairly well targeted and most people did want them. Ignoring for the moment the scary database that produces these lists, if you got 10 pieces of spam offering you legitimite, cheap things you may want to buy, I don't think people would be upset at all. In fact, it might make a good e-commerce site. [midnightbox.com]
Re: (Score:2)
That's the advantage of a botnet - if you've got enough zombies in your network then there's no way they're all going to get blacklisted, and it's possible to replace nodes that have been quick enough that it won't make much difference.
Get off my lawn. (Score:4, Interesting)
I would. I'd mind terribly. Putting aside the creepy privacy issues (which would be enough to set me off), I just simply don't like push advertising at all. I don't want my life to interrupted by people interjecting their pleas for me to give them my money for crap I don't need.
I don't like TV ads. I don't like radio ads. I don't like billboards. I don't like fliers on phone poles. I HATE people who stick menus in my apartment door, I HATE telemarketers, and I'd hate spammers too even if they were selling me things I want. I have a habit of stopping doing business with any business that gets too pushy with its advertising (like the people who stick menus in your door), and a spam for something I want is the best way to keep me from ever buying it (at least from that vendor).
The only kind of advertising that I like is the kind where you list a product in some public forum, and I find it when I decide I'm in the market for it. (e.g. Froogle.) Anything that tries to come and find me to tell me how wonderful my life would be if I just bought it is annoying. (And God forbid an ad actually be effective and influence me to do something unwise with my money.) Unless your ad entertains me, go away.
(And yes, I realize that I am on the far end of crotchety about advertising, but that's just my opinion.)
Parent
fully clothed women popping balloons (Score:2, Funny)
How is he selling this book? (Score:2)
Balloon Popping?! (Score:2, Informative)
For the lazy, see http://www.mellyloon.com/ [mellyloon.com] and http://www.looneynudes.com/preview/lnasampl.html [looneynudes.com] and others (Google away, dudes).
Oddly, it's just not appealing to me. I'm not be the Slashdot uber-geek I thought I was. Now perhaps, balloon pooping . . .
It may, but there may be solutions (Score:4, Insightful)
Then, of course, there's reducing the reward, the amount of people who respond. This is a technical solution in the form of better spam filtering. It's already getting much better. Even just 5 years ago it was still somewhat rare to see ISPs filter their mail, now virtually all of them do. Also the filtering itself is getting better. Rather than just rely on a simple analysis of a given message it is cross checking messages, some of it even across different organizations. By improving this we can drastically drop the number of people they are able to successfully contact and thus lower the reward. If 1 in 100 spams go to someone, you don't need many of those someones to respond to make some money. However if less than 1 in 10,000,000 go through, you need a much higher response rate to make it worth while.
So while there's not a silver bullet it IS something that can be mitigated by going at it from a couple of different ways. If it goes from something you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on with zero risk to something that it's hard to make a couple grand a month on that is likely to put you in prison, the number of spammers will start dropping.
Born Every Minute (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh. There's a sucker born every minute. [wikipedia.org] The Interenet hasn't changed human nature - just given the con men more tools.
Innocuous? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, let's think of the kinds of people who would pay money to watch that...
Thought so.