Does Spam EVER Work?

[js_africanus]

Hope this works:

I searched npr.org for “spam” and this was one of the hits. It should be the page for the story and not the media file. It is “Spam Top Ten,” “AOL lists the top ten enticements used in the subject lines of unsolicited e-mail in the past year. You’ll recognize many of them.”

Morning Edition Returns: Spam Top Ten

BTW, when The Daily Show interviewed the spammer…that was brilliant.

[Cervaise]

@Colophon

Hell, I’d flay the skin off babies and dip them in balsamic vinegar for that kind of money.

I can streamline your dipping operation by putting you in touch with a bulk supplier of pre-flayed babies.

[Excalibre]

@Colophon

Hell, I’d flay the skin off babies and dip them in balsamic vinegar for that kind of money.

Well, yeah, I would too, no problem. But spam? Geez . . . there are some moral lines I wouldn’t cross.

(Incidentally, is balsamic vinegar really necessary? The cheap stuff’s no good, and if you’re using the expensive stuff, that’s a big part of your overhead . . . )

[Ms2001]

One thing to remember is that the people sending out the spam aren’t necessarily the people selling the product. If Company A pays Spammer X a bunch of money to send out a billion emails, then spam certainly “works” for Spammer X. And if Company A notices that they didn’t get any sales from the spam campaign, and never goes back to the spammer again - oh well, there are a lot more gullible companies out there.

[LilyoftheValley]

@jackelope

There was a story a year or two back about some spammer’s business records briefly becoming freely available on-line due to some kind of programming glitch or something.

<snip> no pun intended :eek:
The story that jackelope describes in his post is so good that I’m attaching the link here.

Among the people who responded in July to Amazing’s spam, which bore the subject line, “Make your penis HUGE,” was the manager of a $6 billion mutual fund, who ordered two bottles of Pinacle to be shipped to his Park Avenue office in New York City. A restaurateur in Boulder, Colorado, requested four bottles. The president of a California firm that sells airplane parts and is active in the local Rotary Club gave out his American Express card number to pay for six bottles, or $300 worth, of Pinacle. The coach of an elementary school lacrosse club in Pennsylvania ordered four bottles of the pills.

Other customers included the head of a credit-repair firm, a chiropractor, a veterinarian, a landscaper and several people from the military. Numerous women also were evidently among Amazing Internet’s customers.

The article is worth reading for the following quote alone:

“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,” said a San Diego salesman who ordered two bottles of Pinacle in early July.

[LilyoftheValley]

Oh, and for the record, I used to work a block or two away from the place where the penis pills supposedly were packed. Funny enough, I never noticed any men with large bulges in their pants strolling around at lunchtime.

[Askance]

@LilyoftheValley

Oh, and for the record, I used to work a block or two away from the place where the penis pills supposedly were packed. Funny enough, I never noticed any men with large bulges in their pants strolling around at lunchtime.

Not that you were looking, of course.

[TJdude825]

There was an MPSIMS (or perhaps Pit) thread, maybe a year ago, where someone linked to a story about a guy who bought tons of stuff via spam. As I recall, you could walk through his house and have difficulty finding something that wasn’t bought from a spammer. aeropl, of course dopers won’t admit it, but ask at your first ten google hits for “message board” and I bet you’ll get at least a few "LOL yeh i gott a penis pi11s frum them 1nce OMG it totttaly worcked!!!111"s
Better yet, ask in a chat room, if anyone will even listen to you.

My question is, if we could successfully convince people to stop responding to spam, would the spammers give up, or just send even more, or some combination of the two?

[FlippyFly]

This thread got me thinking about how many people are actually making money off of spam. I came to a figure of about 5000.

I have had my yahoo adress for about 5 years now and been active in the internet community (message boards, ebay, ect…) so I figure I may be on 10% of the spam lists. I get about 500 messages a week, almost all filtered out, thank god, and if you figure your average spammer sends out one email a week, that leads me to believe that there are about 5000 people trying to get rich off spam…

anyone know a real number, or have better assumptions than I do?