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Steve Atkins wrote:
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.
Frankly, I don't think the original question can at all be answered, or
at least, not by us to the level of certainty that Barry wants.
How many <insert your favourite _real_ company> really has any idea of
how much revenue was derived from ad technique X, vs. ad technique Y. If
they do, it's because they're asking at the time of sale. Can you
imagine bot controllers actually asking that, let alone, being able to
gather/measure accurately?
Secondly, the only people (aside from the criminals) able to answer that
is law enforcement officials, in the case of "products" only sold thru
spam unless _they're_ willing to do statistical breakdowns of
lead-origin (what on earth for, the convictions usually aren't based on
spam per-se?), they're not going to know, and frankly, they'll probably
not tell us in that level of fine granularity even if they knew it.
When you see a conviction of, say, someone like Rizler, absent
indications that they marketed by any other means, what else would you
assume the revenue report is of? Even if it's word-of-mouth, the
original was by spam.
Thirdly, they're criminals - rule #1.
Fourthly, the only people making these pronouncements are the spammers
themselves and LE. Both of which have an incentive to exaggerate. Mind
you, whenever I've seen a spammer claim huge revenues and had
independent results shown, the spammers lied big time. Eg: Slaton
claimed to be making 6 figures/month. Oh no, he was fleeing process
servers, and his vehicles were repro'd. Canter (of Canter and Siegal)
was trying to get a programming job (I have a copy of his resume around
somewhere) and was fleeing process servers sic'd on him by his (ex) wife
Siegal. Etc.
Fifthly, do we include phishers/CC scammers, 419s etc?
All we can take as a given is that _someone_ is making money out of this
mess.
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