Spam - how does it work.

katerinasol

I'm not talking about 'you've won the Nigerian lottery' emails, even though they're hilarious too... but mostly referring to the nonsense 'jbljbgsdjgcialis spamvirus.com' emails that get filtered straight to junk mail.

How do spammers make money off them? I read somewhere that spam is a multimillion dollar industry, but are there really that many naive people in the world that will still click on these kind of links?

kwikbreaks

katerinasol wrote: »

..are there really that many naive people in the world that will still click on these kind of links?

Yes .

katerinasol

kwikbreaks wrote: »

Yes .

That simple huh what a shame people still fall for it! I kind of assumed nobody did anymore, what with spam filters etc!

Ximian

Yes there are people that are that naive, if there weren't the spammers would have changed their tactics and given up on that old scam. Instead, the scammer have upped their game and have changed the stories and are also preying on people on other sites (dating for example). There are people out there that still believe in easy (free) money. How about $400k, where a woman mortgaged her house, wiped out her husbands retirement fund to get her millions of dollars: http://www.katu.com/news/34292654.html
How about a British woman that sent £80k (and then forced to sell her home to cover debts) to a scammer because she was in love with a man she had never met: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1351954/Kate-Roberts-scammed-Nigerian-fraudsters-sent-80k-charming-US-soldier.html

Some people out there are scamming the scammers and this site has some great examples: http://www.419eater.com/index.php

Jaymo

Usually these type of Spam e-mails tend to arrive from Russia, Germany, China or within the UK as those for countries as the worst for Spamming....fact.

The Spammer/Fraudster will sending out the same e-mail to literally millions of e-mail addresses in the hope someone will click on the link or type in their details, and by doing so will allow for trojans, worms, viruses etc to infect your machine which can record your keystrokes or simply harm your computer.

Once their in, you have a lot more things to worry about but as long as you don't click on links in e-mails from people or companies you do not recognise that you will be ok

Ximian

Jaymo has mentioned the other type of spam which either contains malicious software or links to sites that will install malicious software. Spammers and scammers are crafty and will use any opportunity to try and get people to click on links or respond to the emails. They use news headline events especially, for example when Michael Jackson died there were a thousands of spam emails that were sent out that mentioned videos of Michael Jackson. More recently the events in Japan were used, fake donation sites, videos of the tsunami etc.. Emails from "banks" claiming that your account is now locked and you need to reset the password are also quite common. If you're interested, read up about the Russian Business Network or RBN and see what these scumbags get up to.

macman

It's purely based on volume. Only a tiny proprtion (a fraction of a percent) get through, and only a tiny fraction of those are responded to.
But because it's so cheap to send them out by the billion, it still pays.