Penis pill spam shrinks Penis pill spam dramatically shrunk over the weekend after a notorious spam affiliate brought down the shutters on its own operation. Spamit, a mainstay of the so-called Canadian Pharmacy business, announced its intention to shut up shop last week, saying that increased attention on its business had made it impossible to carry …
Does anyone know of a study that looks at the economics of penis pill spam? OK - so the spam is cheap to send out - but it's not free - there's a small cost associated with each message. And spam filters, Spam Assassin etc are removing a lot of the messages and recipients are deleting many more - so how many actually get through?
And how many of those generate a response? What's the economics of this sort of operation?
By no means scientific, because I don't know the numbers, but the sending cost per spam mail would be incredibly low (especially since they're *stealing* other people's bandwidth and CPU cycles to send the actual messages, of course they have to pay some low-life shitbag for use of a botnet but I suspect that isn't too expensive either).
The response rate is also incredibly low, but high enough that they cover their costs and then some. If it wasn't, then spam would go away because it just wouldn't make financial sense to do it.
Spammers are evil, but you can also thank the fraction of a percent of clueless idiots who buy crap from them for making it a sustainable business model.
I'm getting more offers to increase my dimensions (sadly, no one seems to care about those of us who could use a slight reduction in size). I agree with Elmer Phud regarding 419s being light entertainment. Last week, I got the "apply for a job as a payments forwarder" with the "I'm dying of cancer and want to give all my money away" appended right below it, in the same email.
Every now and then, I get a really creative one, which makes reading all the repeats worth the effort! (Even if the text has been copied so much it begins to look like a transcription of a message from a game of Telephone)
Paris, she's an expert.
Seize the rights to Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra, make them non-prescription drugs worldwide, and sell them in vending machines for one unit each of the local currency.
Any harms resulting from this shift in paradigm would be more than offset by the resultant drop in spam loads.
Pfizer et al can be paid a small royalty of a quarter unit of currency per pill sold.
Doctors, particularly those at walk-in clinics that take all comers, would be happy too. They'd no longer have to deal with the innumerable sheepish middle aged men they have today stammering as they request a prescription for ED meds.
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