Rent-a-Spammer

We are all used to seeing spam, usually lots of it, even if you have good anti-spam defences in place, some still gets through, as it is a game of cat and mouse between the spammers and anti-spam solutions. The spammers try a new technique which works for a while, the anti-spam brigade adapts and blocks it, and round-and-round we go, ad infinitum ;-)

Here's a spam e-mail that is actually offering "mass dispatch of electronic letters" also known to most of us as Spam or UCE.



The spammer(s) offering their services here are almost certainly using one or more botnets to send out the spam, this means that the chances of him/her/them getting caught and prosecuted is quite slim. As you can see the pickings [as far as the spammer is concerned] are far from slim!

To a potential spammer customer the costs are miniscule*, as shown below. These are the prices per e-mail:

• 1 Million = 0.012 cents each


• 5 Million = 0.01 cents each


• 10 Million = 0.008 cents each

No wonder that businesses who are desperate for new customers, or sales [or both] are tempted to use these types of services!

Although the fiscal [monetary] costs are small from the perspective of a customer of this type of spamming service, the potential cost in loss of business if you are a well known and previously respected company or brand can be immense.

Luckily these sort of companies/brands don't tend to use these sorts of services, this means that the companies/brands that do use them are, shall we say, not as ethical or concerned about alienating/annoying their customers, as the wares they offer tend to be considered to be somewhat grey; fake, illegal, stolen, of dubious quality, or just an outright scam to get you to part with your credit/debit card details. This often results in your data being mis-used or sold on to others to mis-use.

The really worrying thing about this, aside from the data theft/ID theft side of the coin, is that according to some sources, around 10 percent of people who receive spam, actually buy the goods offered. Even if they have been conned/scammed before! Talk about failing to learn from your mistakes!

So, if the 10 percent of people that do buy from spam would kindly refrain from doing so, then the spammers business model would quickly become unprofitable; the end result would be that spam would drop to levels that we can currently only dream about. It could get to the point where we see levels of less than 10 percent, compared to the 90+ percent we have today!

More details on the survey results can be found here.

I've also just found another survey, which claims, amongst other things that: "One in five Brits 'buy software from spam'"

Here's another that claims: "Spam Prompts 11 Percent of Computer Users to Buy"

My original posting on the survey mentioned above, was back in July of 2005, here's a link to it: 'Do You Like Spam?' It even contains details on how the name came about. Here's a link to the video mentioned...enjoy!

So, go on own up, have you ever bought anything from a spam e-mail, are you in the 10-25 percent of those that do? ;-)

* Assuming my maths are correct?

Footnote: Hormel [creators of the tinned meat product known as SPAM] have just lost a court case [another one] in which they tried to stop an anti-spam company using the word 'Spam' in their product name, as they claim that this is their trademark.