After reading this thread in the pit I found myself wondering how it is that spammers and the like make their money.
The obvious is that some poor schlub actually thinks there’s a penis enlargment pill and sends money receiving nothing in return.
In the link in the thread above it said that he was making $50 - 70K a year. Are there really that many gullible people?
What about people who create viruses, trojans, worms. What’s in it for them? Is it simply a glory thing? Is there some kind of secret society of hackers and virus creators where each is trying to top the other. Is anyone making money off of this stuff?
It seems like so much work for what they get in return that I just can’t imagine why anyone would do it.
While some do it for the “glory”, oftentimes trojans and worms and the like open up infested computers to host spammer’s web sites and send out tons of spam email. The creator then gets money from the spammers.
In the past, I have speculated that Anti-Virus Software companies also have virus writers under their employ, but I have no proof.
Well… yes. Spammers blanket millions of people, targeting the fraction of a percent of the population that’ll fall for their schtick. Enough suckers are born every minute to keep these guys in business.
Yep, usually. There’s not some big secret society, but a lot of loosely knit groups of punks with a flair for coding. While their work sometimes makes a political statement, it’s generally motivated by ego.
I see LordVor beat me to the punch about spammers who create worms and such.
Occasionally a virus will get into the wild from an odd vector. A few years ago, a benign virus created by a computer science professor became fairly common. It simply reminded an infected user to scan his or her floppies for viruses.
For insight into the minds and culture of hackers, crackers, phreaks, warez doodz, script kiddies, and so forth, I recommend The New Hacker’s Dictionary
I am not sure that this is true. Most spam is sent by people whose business is sending spam. They are hired by people whose business is trying to sell things or run scams. Maybe spam does not sell stuff but people believe it does. The spammers make money in a similar manor to the way that more conventional advertisers make money by convincing people that they can help you sell you stuff.
but unlike conventional advertisers, you can link a sale directly to the piece of spam that referred the customer to the seller. Dell can guess that a person who bought a system saw an ad for it in a certain place, but Joe’s House of Penis Enlargement Pills can tell that a customer came to their site from a particluar advertisement sent by a particular spammer.
So if the spammer didn’t find him customers, he’d be going somewhere else with his advertising budget.
There was a major newspaper (I think the Wall Street Journal) that looked into the business of spam. Either through papers uncovered during a lawsuit or some other means, they actually found customers who bought the penile enlargement pills (one of whom runs a mutual fund on Wall Street, THAT detail I remember).
LordVorI hadn’t made that connection between worms and hackers.
I have one more question, sometimes I get spam that doesn’t make any sense. Just a random series of words that seem completely unrelated. What’s the purpose of that? Just to see if my e-mail address is good so they can send the real spam?
When it comes to spam, the great god of computer science has seen to it that there’s very little work involved at all.
You can find automatic programs that scan thousands of message boards, chat rooms and miscellaneous documents to find email addresses. Or you can even get a list of known domain names and generate random user names to go with them.
The next step is to write a spam message. Given the spelling and grammar I’ve seen in some messages, this doesn’t take much effort, either.
The final step is to simply use a commercial email program to send out a kajillion messages, and purge the bouncebacks.
Voila, you have sent your message to the teeming millions for a fraction of a cent per thousand, and you have a nicely purged list to do it next time.
The whole thing pays for itself with only a fraction of one percent actually purchasing something.