On Mar 27, 2006, at 8:50 AM, Barry Shein wrote:
On March 26, 2006 at 18:14 steve(_at_)blighty(_dot_)com (Steve Atkins) wrote:
Define "spammer". From the rest of your mail I got
the impression you're talking about people who harvest
addresses and try and sell (possibly fraudulent) products
to those recipients, but it wasn't entirely clear.
You need to be pretty specific when using such loaded
terms if you want useful answers.
I'll take that as a "no, I don't know of any". It's not really
necessary to each weigh in with a negatory.
I know of lots. But your question was far too broad to be really
useful. That's why I asked for clarification.
There are a number of public companies that are, by any
reasonable definition, spammers. Numbers about their
businesses are easy enough to get hold of. There are a
bunch more that are private companies. They're pretty easy
to get hold of too.
But without knowing what flavour of spammer you're interested
in, the question was way too broad.
How about hard info about anyone who has made money on a zombie bot
army?
Most of the numbers I've seen about actual profit from the zombie
hordes (rather than ddos exortion amounts) have been click-fraud,
rather than spam. In the case that closed a couple of months ago
that was $58,000 over 13 months for click-fraud.
I realize one might say well they're all from Outer Slobbovia where $1
American can buy you a mansion but again that's just circumstantial
and not "facts".
I know there were some significant busts of such people recently in
that seething pit of third world misery known as Holland, but were
they making much money? I dunno.
I'll look into the Jaynes case John mentioned.
The AZ attorney general confiscated something like thirty million
dollars from a group of penis enlargement spammers.
It's hard, though, to argue what fraction of that is actually due to the
spam rather than due to the sale of dodgy pharmeceuticals. That seems to
be not unusual for the more profitable end of spammers - they're
selling a profitable product and spam is just one thing they do, so
it's hard to say how much the spam drives those revenues.
Cheers,
Steve
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg