Former Spammer Reveals Secrets in New Book 241
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."
Comment removed (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
Re:Let me guess... (Score:5, Funny)
Of course it doesn't go down well, it's enlarged. Sheesh.
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.
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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
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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
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I wish my company hadn't decided to go the route they did but in the end, regardless of my words speaking against it, it's was not my choice to make. All I do is tell them the effectiveness of it.
It sucks but it's a fact of life if I want to keep my job.
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.
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Paid in CASH?! (Score:5, Insightful)
photos of fully clothed women popping balloons (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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Only plausible source: (Score:3)
Maybe it was the email database from a softcore porn site that specializes in fully-clothed women popping balloons?
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Not my Church. (Score:4, Funny)
brought to you by the local morality guide.
Re:Not my Church. (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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What the HELL do people get out of THAT?
BOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooring.
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Must
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)
Re:Actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
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How do you know? Do you actually read all your spam?
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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?
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
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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
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Sorry, I didn't mean to infer that you were doing either of those. I was more responding to the position that there is some childhood event which made people pre-disposed to such things. Most such explanations end up being Freudian in nature, and then I just took the opportunity to point out that he wasn't the most rational of sources. So muc
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!).
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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)
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Jeeze! It is too simple (Score:5, Insightful)
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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?
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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
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If rights to food clothes and shelter were given"
--Boots Riley, The Coup, "I Love Boosters!" on Pick a Bigger Weapon
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The solution is simple. The Chinese handled problems with the opium trade by killing the addicts. This drove down demand considerably. Perhaps a similar campaign can be waged on email users. I guarantee if all email recipients were killed, there would be a substantial reduction in successful spammers.
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Proposal: legalize credit card fraud against spammed products!
Step 2, DDOS spammers by flooding them with orders to fake addresses using invalid credit card numbers.
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.
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fully clothed in what? nurses uniforms? fettish gear? rubber? a gimp suit?
Well, fully clothed in balloons of course!
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Re:A Gimp Suit ?!? (Score:4, Funny)
I don't believe in an afterlife... (Score:5, Funny)
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Aren't _all_ sales person?
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I know what it will look like (Score:2)
Hmm, I wonder if Satan would pay me a usage fee if I trademarked that. Eh, probably not, he has enough lawyers to fight his way out of it.
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ob ATHF (Score:4, Funny)
http://www.vimeo.com/78881 [vimeo.com]
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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.
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I'm not saying all late-night TV schemers are legit (few are, imo). But once you've made your first million or so, you are pretty much set (Invest 3/4 of it and your RoR on a mediocre year is over 50k). You might as well train the 'next generation' with the understanding you get to tap a few % of what they make as overhead.
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Not really -- it probably indicative of him being tired of living an underground life and having to watch his back. And he's certainly sitting on good money. Like other markets (drugs, etc.) some people will push until they make enough money they are content with, then pack it in. It's just a calculated risk -- pursue something long enough to reach a certain cash goal, and if yo
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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
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So, why don't these millionaire-author guys keep doing it? Because it's hard work all the time. Books, OTOH, are hard work for the time taken to research, write, and promote it.... b
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.Re: (Score:2)
Now with legitimate spammers, they will honor complaints and unsubscribes. Processing them quickly does help a lot, because you can just repurchase the email on another list and continue slamming the hell out of them until they unsub once again. Heh. You just purchase or create new "lists" ad nauseum to get keep them active. Heh.
The on
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In fact, looking over your list of what makes this enterprise "legitimate", every single one of them involves circumventing and defeating the protections that people and ISPs spend a lot of time and money to put up and maintain to keep this mai
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Legitimate as in.. not breaking any laws. There are lots of slimy things you can do that aren't illegal.
That's baloney. If they didn't want it, they wouldn't
There's NO such thing as a "legitimate spam biz" (Score:2)
Sears and Craftsman tools are the worst - everyday there's something.
You guys need to understand that when Chen Lin sends me penis enlargement spams & offers for fake Rolex watches there
Re:There's NO such thing as a "legitimate spam biz (Score:2)
I'm not a spammer, so I object to your use of the "you" pronoun.
____
Anyway, nice sentiment in your post, however there's something you should realize. Your opinion doesn't matter because you're one individual among a group of spam recipients. You won't click an ad and purchase, but for every one of you there are 100 of your peers that will.
When it comes to understanding why spam works, you have to think in terms of group social behavior
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I'm not a spammer, so I object to your use of the "you" pronoun.
Bull. You doth protest too much, methinks, and you know far too much about this business "the owner you know" has to not be a part of it somehow. I suspect you see this owner every time you look in the mirror.
You won't click an ad and purchase, but for every one of you there are 100 of your peers that will.
Actually, it's the other way around. With less than 1% response rate, for every one of us that won't there's another 100 of us that also won't.
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Well. I think most underestimate just how many spammers there are. You can purchase spam software for $500, which lets you input a 50,000 email text file and away you g
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At a certain point, would have a very small marginal effect on quality of life. Whereas, writing a book about it gains him notoriety/fame, which he cannot easily buy.
Someone who is relatively poor might be quite willing to take the risk of spamming (see Todd Moeller, the bit player who went state's evidence in the Adam Vi
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]
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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.)
you are not alone (Score:2)
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I know you're just trolling, but two points:
1) Trying to start a real relationship is different from asking for money (or sex).
2) Forcing your desperation on a stranger is different from asking to deepen a relationship with a friend.
I don't mind Amazon telling me about things that I might like when I log in. I would mind if they started spontaneously emailing me about these things or if one of their partners that I'd never done business with started
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I get refinance your home spam. I
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 . . .
Spam gets a return rate. (Score:2)
The only way to get rid of spam is for everyone on the planet to swear off buying anything based on spam based advertising. I know I never respond to spam, but there's always going to be that one person who does...
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.
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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.
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Innocuous? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, let's think of the kinds of people who would pay money to watch that...
Thought so.
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Morally acceptable piracy (Score:2)
if only that were true... (Score:2)
If all the spam were really targeted that well, I doubt there'd be so much animosity to the problem (except from credit service companies and psychologists who treat addicted gamblers).
What gets me is that after twenty years of using email, and 15 years of getting spam email, and 10 years with the same email address, I am currently getting a breakdown of spams like this (numbers guessed but not unrealistically):
Sounds like a hoax... But is not (Score:2)
I don't think, this article was written by a real (ex-)spammer. Either that, or it has been too heavily edited be plausible.
If he deliberately targeted only recovering gambling addicts or only people in need of particular drugs, he is not even a spammer by some of the (vague) definitions — spammers carpet-bomb all addresses they can reach, without trying to narrow down to the (relatively) small groups of addressees, as a more responsible marketeer would do (not to defend those types).
But, wait a m
Book distribution? (Score:2)
Technical details? (Score:2)
New book? (Score:2)
It seems that this "New book" is actually three years old. Inside the Spam Cartel: Trade Secrets from the Dark Side [amazon.com] (November 1, 2004).
JP
making spam less profitable (Score:2, Insightful)
Spammers pay real money for botnets/phishing websites etc, but their return is higher
than their expenses so they continue to plague us. Our spamfiltering solutions may
diminish their return, but apparently not enough.
One interesting approach (from MIT Spam Conference) was these guys (SPAMALOT), who basically interact with the spammer as much as possible.
http://acm.cs.uic.edu/~lszyba1/ [uic.edu]
I really think its a good idea. If a spammer is trying to get a credit card, give them 50000 phonies. Imagine what would ha
MASSIVE Violation (Score:2, Informative)
He used e-mail addresses of people known to have bought antianxiety medication or antidepressants and targeted them with pharmaceutical spam.
I work at a hospital and am involved in HIPAA regulation compliance. This one line is proof that some company, hospital, care giver, pharmacy or what ever seriously violated HIPAA regulations by disclosing that information. By law that would make the spammer liable and force him to disclose his information for further prosecution of who ever gave him the list(s) of people on medication.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Port ability_and_Accountability_Act [wikipedia.org]
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1. spam
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
I for one wish there was a -6 beating a dead horse mod
I also wish i had the ability to delete