How do spammers work and why aren't they losing money?

I think this may be a spam post.

Tom

 

Tack a fee of a penny on each email. Spam will go away.

 

If you run a board, you're up against creeps like this.

There are others, too, some which claim to pass Captchas (and from the board I run, they can, however they're still obviously spambots).

 

I believe spam sorta works because the cost of sending is virtually zero, so even if you have a miserable success rate, you are still making profit. Most of the proposals for ending spam have included some way of adding a fee to sending email.

 

Should be freaking illegal. Man.

 

Nope. They buy (or, more likely, steal) "Email blaster" software, then buy (again, steal) a list of 2,000,000 email addresses. If they're pros, they also steal (they don't even pretend to buy at this point) lists of open mail servers, so it maybe takes them 10 minutes tops to send out their 2,000,000 fake viagra ads with little threat of getting caught.

 

Charging for email is never going to work. You will piss off "regular" people and those in the know will just change the port and headers. Not going to work.

And spammers are mostly automated. Programs out there scrape web forums, and put the content into a database. Registration is easy, computers are great at captcha's. Incidentally people are not. It amazes me how many people think that a captcha system actually works. It prevents the low level spammers from sending a few thousand, the millions+ spammers have the tools to get around it without even trying. The ones that get them are the weird question ones. Show a picture of a Toyota lineup and ask "what colour is the Prius". But this is where the human part comes in. When the program can't do something, it is flagged for a human spam soldier to continue. The human easily enters the questions, and the automation continues.

Then when they post, the really good ones will use that database and some basic computer AI, to make sentences that somewhat resemble human posts using keywords that are found over and over on the forum. So "Prius", "Toyota", "brakes" maybe big ones here, so the first post might be "Why doesn't my Prius Toyota have good brakes?" Maybe not correct, but somewhat close and meaningless.

Of course these are the high tech spammers. The low tech spammers really are just extremely low paid people in third world countries that get paid by the registration. Take a visit to: https://www.scriptlance.com/

It is a site where people bid on random projects. I have used them a couple times for website maintenance when I have no time to do it myself. You will see probably 200+ new projects every day in the "marketing" category. They say right in the ad they need X registrations on sites A, B, and C, per day with unique emails. They do it, and send the emails, passwords, logins, and all the needed info. Then the buyer puts them in their personal spam database, clicks 1 button and every registration gets a post of spam. Usually about 100 a day runs you $5 USD.

The world of spam is dark and seedy, but technologically a marvel.

 

You would be correct.

 

I do not care if it costs to send email, I want an email reader that extorts the sender to send me money before it offers to let me read their email.

 

Explain please.

My argument is that people with compromised windoze 'puters will wake up and fix their boxes when they are hit with high usage bills, rather than the current conduct of going out and buying another box to 'fix' the problem.

I realize, this being America, that many a dumb-nice person owner of a bot is going to DEMAND that the ISP do something, and certainly not charge for said owner's stupidity. Solutions will follow. I'd like to see ISPs notify owners when their computers are hijacked and then give the owner a short amount of time to kill the bot or pay.

 

Anyone with an infected machine probably isn't the most tech savvy. They can probably "open the internet" (meaning their browser) and then play solitaire or something.

Your ISP has no way of knowing if the bits you are receiving are email, web browsing, porn, torrents, or whatever. What they can know is where it is coming from (ip & port), where it is going to (ip & port), and the raw content. If the content contains an email header like this:

That above (or something similar) is embedded in every email so that clients know who it is from, where it is going, where it came from and so on. It is not required. Data can be anything and follow any standard. Piss of geeks by charging for a love (email) and we will find a way around it. Change the headers to something else. Then email is usually sent over common ports like 25. Change it to 425 or something else completely random, and now the ISP has no idea what it is. So how are they going to charge you for an email that they didn't know was an email? It doesn't have headers and it didn't come from a standard email port. It could just be a webpage. But grandma will continue to use Outlook Express because that's what she knows and get dinged for every email she forwards of her grandson Timmy...

 

2k,
You are pointing out that peek-a-boo has endless variations.
I am pointing out that compromised users currently have no financial incentive to stop being idiots.

Regarding the technical details of identifying email (and I am in no way well versed in the topic) I am a bit skeptical that my email program can connect to my ISP and receive only email data, but the ISP cannot identify it as such.

 

Correct there is no incentive for compromised users to stop being idiots.

And the technical details are the details. Your email program connecting to a server like imap.myserver.com will be noticed by the ISP because that is one of the 3 things it knows (where it is going to). But there is no reason why you can't connect to something.random.com and have that pull the email. The ISP would know you went to something.random.com, but would have no idea (unless you see the headers) that it was email.

So for users like you, you will get dinged per email. The evil geeks that run the spam networks will get around this very very fast.

 

I'll pretend for a moment that I know enough about the technical aspects of email to ask a question, but please keep in mind this is only my somewhat idle curiosity and does not change my earlier point --

My email program queries google for my email.
A bot had earlier sent an email from your neighbor's computer to my gmail account.

If I download the email, is there possible ambiguity which computer sent it, or that it was email ?

 

As the main spam cop and admin of another major vB forum, I can tell you that spammers seem to work all too well, unfortunately. They might be paid pennies for each successful post, but when using good spambot software, a recent database of forum names, protocols and Captcha-breaking routines, they can plant posts in seconds, be contextually correct for the thread subject, and by the hundreds at a time. Their user profiles contain signature quotes, user titles, profile and avatar pics. All planted within a second from registration.

The biggest income biz for spammers now is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) posts. The spammer might be based in India or Turkey but report to be from "newyrok" or "Austin" and post vacuous responses like "Hey, nice idea. I could use one of those." Their sig will have URL's in them from mostly US based companies - some scams, but could also be real legit concerns. Search engine bot crawls pick up the URL's listed (even if invisible) in the posts and rank the URL a tick higher on their listings and hence a higher ranking for user searches. When a company is approached with "I can drive your domain higher on all search engines for a fee" run, don't walk. They can destroy your internet business' credibility. They might also be a "sleeper spammer" and add the poisoned sig weeks or months later after a dozen or more innocent looking posts. That's why its a good idea to have spam fighting plug-ins and manual review of new users and to re-check the questionable users on a watch list at a later date. My watch list is several thousand usernames long. The "banned list" passed twenty thousand several years ago. It is freaking unreal how many of these idiots must exist.

Despite using spam fighting plug-in tools such as Spam-O-Matic and Akismet (I won't list all those do - Google is your friend) we manually check every new user and first posts. Spammers might use invisible fonts or links within posts. That means opening questionable first posts and using the edit button to look for hidden URL's and code. User sig's with URL's are also a tip off. I have had hit and run rogue software installs from just checking a safe-looking URL, so that's a dangerous task in itself. One of the easiest identifiers is a simple Google search as '"username" forum posts'

There are also many internet spam fighting tools we have running in browser tabs for quick searches and spam queries. The tools are unfortunately lagging behind the morphing ability of the best bots. Stop Forum Spam used to be the best but is now so traffic overtaxed it will only catch one in three new spammers.

There may be some money in it for professional spammers, but I have found that most are nOObish amateur numbskulls and can easily be identified, filtered out by email domains or IP strings. And I can't tell you how many raw IP# domains we've completely had to block (whole countries). I often find a new spammer register at my forum and seconds later post here at PC with the same lame type of post under the exact same username. That's bot software in action.