November 15th, 2004

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One Hit and 29, 999 Misses

Spamming, apparently, is still pretty profitable. Fortunately, it’s also getting riskier. From Slashdot, we find this profile of Jeremy Jaynes, a spammer recently handed a 9-year jail term for sending spam emails:

Relatively few people actually responded to Jaynes’ pitches. In a typical month, prosecutors said during the trial, Jaynes might receive 10,000 to 17,000 credit card orders, thus making money on perhaps only one of every 30,000 e-mails he sent out.

But he earned $40 a pop, and the undertaking was so vast that Jaynes could still pull in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead, McGuire said.

I sincerely doubt that jailing spammers domestically is going to curtail the spam problem. This map shows the origins of spam emails. Plenty comes from the US, but plenty also comes from the rest of the world (in particular, China, Japan and Brazil).

Comments: 2 Responses so far

Andrea
November 15th, 2004
11:23 am

Yesterday, I was spammed by someone from whom I bought an eBay item earlier this year. They wanted me to send $5 to their PayPal account and to provide my PayPal account details, so that other recipients of the chain mail would send me $5. As far as I know, this is illegal in Canada. I sent the email to eBay, of course, but I also sent the details to RECOL.ca, the RCMP’s online economic fraud unit. Since I’d previously dealt with the spammer, I had their full name and Canadian address. The full headers also included all the other email addresses to which he sent the email — apparently all eBay people. He struck me as pretty stupid. However, he did use some sort of script to keep me from forwarding the email — some Outlook trick. I just used cut-and-paste.

If more people reported these scams before they became crimes, perhaps we could all sleep better at night. I’m hyper-vigilant because a government computer with my husband and my resumes, SINs, and other details was stolen earlier this year and now I have to monitor everything for fraud.

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Gradin.com: It's like family, only weirder
November 15th, 2004
11:27 am

99,999 Innocent Bystanders Spammed

“If only one out of every 100,000 people responds to spam and the spammers earn around $11, spamming is profitable. The other 99,999 people who don’t respond, who never respond, are innocent bystanders.” –Microsoft

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