Sex sells but sex spam sells even more
“Unhappy with the size of your manhood?” Shockingly, spammers are making millions of dollars from peddling Viagra and other products and services on the Internet.
According to a new study, researchers found that one response for every 12.5 million email blasts is enough to turn a profit.
The report, “Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion” claims that spammers are likely to earn nearly US$7,000 a day, and revenues of $3.5 million in a year.
Researchers from University of California Berkeley and San Diego took over a portion of the Storm, a peer-to-peer botnet that propagates via spam, usually by directing recipients to download an executable from a website.
The team hijacked 75,869 machines and routed their own fake spam through them, claiming “the best way to measure spam is to be a spammer”.
The spam directed people to a fake pharmacy website, offering them cheap pills including Viagra, the drug that treats erectile dysfunction. However, the buy button resulted in an error message.
The researchers claim to have sent nearly 469 million spam emails, but the response rate was less than 0.00001 per cent. According to the scientists, legitimate organisations report rates closer to 2.15 per cent.
“After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted,” says the researchers.
Researchers revealed that a spammer could still make a tidy sum: “Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88-a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period.”
