Just out of curiosity... what is the point of spam?

[topolina]

Do enough people fall for these scams to make it profitable for the spammers?

Just wondering...

Thanks!

- topo

[ryanhellyer]

I heard a theory recently, that the spammers aren't making any money from spamming at all. But that the people who make the automated spam software are making a killing by duping the spammers themselves into handing over ridiculously huge quantities of money to send thousands/millions of spam messages.


I don't know how much truth is in that, but I wish they'd stop. I found an amusing/disturbing link recently to a spambot company which offered spam software for download at an absorbatant price. Amusingly they had a "Report Abuse" button on their site which was an email link to a GMail address. I suspect nothing would come of sending an email to that address. They also had a disclaimer on their site saying that users of their software were not allowed to use it for illegal purposes :P

[topolina]

Wow, that is crazy!

[ryanhellyer]

Yep, definitely crazy. How true it is I don't know.

On one hand, I'm glad there's a chance the moron spammers are getting duped out of bundles of cash, but on the other hand I want to burn the spam softwares websites to the ground ... unfortunately websites are non-flammable

[knupNET]

Yeah I think spam has become so out of control that nobody is making money yet it's making everyones life miserable. Who knows.

[BigAlReturns]

Look at it in a biological sense (it reminds me of a predator-prey relationship!):
Spam comes along and finds a naive environment, perfect for it to make money in, so grows exponentially
Becomes so big its a problem - people start to develop anti spam software, and become wise to the emails that do get through, so amount of spam levels off.
Unfortunately, it will never be eradicated, because that will lead to increasing gullibility of the population, so the level of spam will increase again. The best we can hope for is setting conditions, such as superb junk/spam filters, so the level of spam gradually reduces to a very small amount, with no profit to anyone who does it. At the moment I fear spammers still probably do make money - they can send millions of emails a week, and less than a dozen or so conversions would pay for this.
Say it costs me $40 to send 1 million emails, and my product sells at $5 - I need to get a conversion rate of just 0.000008% to break even - and this is taking what I would think to be a pretty expensive rate for sending emails! Admittedly you have the costs of spam software/buying email addresses, but this is only a one time expenditure - once you have these you might as well go on using them.