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Inside The Spam Cartel
August 7th, 2007 by Jon Waraas


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Wanna read up on how the big boys make their money? Spammer-X made $15,000 a week from email spam, he stored that money in boxes full of $20 bills.

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Here is the yahoo review.

He spent 10 hours a day, seven days a week studying how to send spam and avoid filtering technologies in security software designed to weed out garbage e-mail. Most spam filters are effective 99 percent of the time; he aimed for that remaining window, using tricks such as including slightly different images in his spam, which can fool filters into thinking the e-mail is legitimate.

“The better I got at spam, the more money I made,” Ed said.

He would start a spam run by finding an online merchant who wanted to sell a product. Then he’d acquire a list of e-mail addresses– another commodity that has spawned its own market in the world of spam. He’d also set up a domain name, included as a link in a spam message, that, if clicked, would redirect the recipient to the merchant’s Web site, enabling Ed to get credit for the referral.

The spam would then be sent from a network of hacker-controlled computers, called botnets. Those machines are often consumer PCs infected with malicious software that a hacker can control. Ed would “rent” time on those computers from another group of hackers that specialized in creating botnets.

If one of the spam recipients bought something, Ed would get a percentage of the sale. For pharmaceuticals the commission was around 50 percent, he said.

Response rates to spam tend to be a fraction of 1 percent. But Ed said he once got a 30 percent response rate for a campaign. The product? A niche type of adult entertainment: photos of fully clothed women popping balloons.

I just bought it, and very excited to read it. You can buy it here - Amazon (no aff, im not like that)

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13 Comments

Comment by TextAdSearch
2007-08-07 23:21:36

Balloon popping, 30% response rate? Surely some sort of joke unless the spam was targeted which I doubt as it was spam.

 
Comment by Justin
2007-08-08 00:12:20

This is old lol I got the pdf if you want to read it…

 
Comment by Ted
2007-08-08 01:29:21

Spam is evil, I’ve wasted a bunch of time trying to control it, now I let Gmail look after it all.

However if I thought I could make $15,000 a week without being arrested then I might be interested :)

 
Comment by Cody
2007-08-08 02:09:39

Thank God his house never burned down…that woulda been the most expensive house fire ever

 
Comment by David Lithman
2007-08-08 11:28:08

Is this that same guy from like Washington who is now in Federal Prison ?

 
Comment by jonwaraas
2007-08-08 16:54:51

I think your talking about the spam king. The guy who made millions off of myspace..

This guy is from New York..

 
Comment by Ginene
2007-08-08 21:34:02

Wow! I’m sure that he had to have gotten penalized from this. Either way that takes alot of intelligence to pull that off.

 
Comment by JerkyBeef
2007-08-08 23:25:38

Didn’t Gmail get hacked?

Yeah i may be interested as well if jail and asset forfeit wasn’t a consequence

 
Comment by Tim Spangler
2007-08-09 02:28:06

I wrote a story on the economics of spam back in March for the news wire service I used to work for that some of you might find interesting. The conversion rate I come up with is more like .00036%. Since the press always seems to get things wrong, feel free to correct me in the comments section if you find a blatant error. :D

http://www.timspangler.com/spamonomics-the-business-of-junk-mail/

-Tim, the journalism school dissident

 
Comment by Michael Fultz
2007-08-10 03:36:42

This looks like this is something that is worth reading..

 
Comment by KingJacob
2007-08-11 13:51:20

Why would you store your money in boxes full of twenty dollar bills? Youd think he could afford a safe or evena swiss account.

 
Comment by Nathan
2007-08-11 14:10:29

Looks very interesting, thinking about purchasing it as well!

 
2007-08-21 04:20:24

Gmail was supposed to be an infinite email account right? Well, I get so much spam that if I don’t delete my spam folder, I will exceed the 2 Gig limit.

 

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