And You Thought Spam was an Easy Business? Think Again.
by
on November 11, 2008,
Yesterday BBC reported on a study carried out after a working spam network had been hijacked by scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego. The network studied uses infected home computers to send junk mail in mass volumes instead of using servers of its own. It is reported that at one time the network controlled over a million of machines.
To make the study possible the scientists seized control over a small part of the network and sent out spam messages themselves to see how recipients will react. A total of 469 million junk emails have been sent for the study which resulted in only 28 attempts of sales of libido enhancers (sales have not been completed as the campaign was fake and was not intended to make profit so when visitors tried to submit payment details to make the purchase, they received error messages).
The irony is that the scientists were actually engaged in spamming quite a huge number of people with their messages and that can obviously be questioned when it comes to methodology of the study. But the results still seem to be worth noting and hopefully will offer some hints at how to fight spam efficiently.
The most interesting discovery of the study was the fact that the results of their operations are quite moderate with only one purchase for every 12.5 million of spam emails sent. Yet this small response rate still ensures enough profits to make the business worthwhile. Based on the results the researchers received, they estimate daily revenue for the entire network at $7k which translates to over $2 million per year.
I believe the results may be different for different types of spam campaigns. In this study the scientists worked mainly on an online pharmacy website while there are tons of other types of spam messages luring people into various dubious activities like contacting organizers of scam lotteries and potential business partners in Nigeria waiting to exchange your thousand dollars to a few millions in your banking account.
And while you may think that the majority of people are clever enough not to react to such scam messages, the results of another recent research - the one carried out by Microsoft, Yahoo, Western Union and African Development Bank and focused mainly on lottery scams - show that the response rate for this type of scams seem to be much higher with one out of 44 internet users admitting they have lost money because of such scams.
Now that we know the numbers from these studies, I have to admit that I have something of a sympathy to spammers now that I know how much work they need to do before they start earning something. After all, infecting over a million computers to send endless spam messages sounds like a huge preparatory work. But this is jokingly, of course, and seriously I do hope that this is only the first in a series of various studies to research and help fight spam.
The only thing is that I think if scientists actually need to spam us with their messages for research purposes, at least they could show some explanation and a warning notice about the potential damages of clicking links in spam messages to people trying to buy something from the fake drug store they created for the test instead of showing error messages leaving potential buyers to doubt if they will receive their drugs or if they should just click a link in another spam message which will happen to be a valid one.
