Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 02:22:27 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Martin Karlsson" <martin.karlsson@visit.se>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: this spam Message-ID: <002b01c17664$3fa0e240$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20011126100247.A938@foo31-249.visit.se>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Martin Karlsson >Sent: Monday, November 26, 2001 1:03 AM >To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: this spam > > >A few short (OT) questions: Why do spammers spam? I mean, people do not >buy "products" from the guy who sent them spam, do they? (please tell me >they don't...) yes, they do. I hate to be the one to tell you but if you send out 100's of millions of e-mail messages your going to get one or two suckers that will respond. There was a very good site run by "Rolf" a while back that dealt specifically with Make Money Fast spams. (MMF) He specialized in collecting MMF's and printing them out and mailing them to the US Postmasters who were responsible for the addresses that the spammers where listing in the MMF's to send money to. (a quick FYI it doesen't cost you anything to send mail to the postmaster) Often, the postmasters would set a "watch" on the addresses (invariably these are PO boxes to prevent the victims from finding out who was really getting the money) and many people were caught. (it's a federal crime to use the Postal System to receive money from pyramind schemes) Anyway, he had a number of testimonials from contrite former spammers who reported response rates in the .000001 - .000002 % range from MMF spams. (as if the miserable response rates somehow made it so what they were doing wasn't illegal) This is just one more of those schemes where the thief spends thousands of dollars of other people's money so he can get $20. It's no different than the people that bust into your car with a crowbar and cause $2K worth of damage smashing your dashboard to extract a stereo that they can sell to a pawnshop for $20. > So, how do spammers make enough money to be able to keep >on spamming? They don't "make" money, you need to adjust your terminology there. They steal it. Another common scam is setting a website up with banner adverts on it, then spamming the world with an e-mail with the site URL in it. People often will go to the site to get the spammers real e-mail address and their site access will increment the banner advertisement counter and put another .0001 cent in the account of the spammer. If that ever happens to you you always want to take the time to e-mail the advertiser in the banner as to what's going on, so they can pull their advertising from the spammers website. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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