(no subject)

[mithriltabby]

I can understand spammers selling mortgages and viagra and all that because there’s a continuing market for it, and they only have to get a very small hit rate of fools to make it worthwhile to spam everyone. But haven’t the frelling 419 scammers managed to find all the gullible suckers already? Or is there an extension to P T Barnum’s aphorism: a new sucker logs onto the Internet every minute?

Comments

[cmccurry.livejournal.com]

Or it is a matter of the companies thinking that if they just wear us down with advertisements, we'll buy something from them.

[mithriltabby]

I think there is a rule in advertising that you need to get people to look at an advert at least half a dozen times before they’ll consider buying it. I find the Nigerian scammers puzzling, though, because they’re preying on a different social characteristic than advertisers are, and I’d expect saturation with the usual “woe is me, please help me transfer oodles of money, I’ll give you a cut” spiel to wear out much more quickly than “buy this!”

[cmccurry.livejournal.com]

It's still puzzling to see so many companies still using email advertisements. I would have thought that companies understand by now that spamming is a BAD thing and that their marketing budget is better spent on other kinds of advertising.

[mithriltabby]

Reputable companies don’t. Fly-by-night weasel-o-rama operations, on the other hand, can still make money off the idiots that respond to spam.

[cmccurry.livejournal.com]

Point. So what we need is a two-prong solution that carries out harm against these companies and educates the idiots. -:-)

Operation "Make a Snowman" would be a good start.

[mithriltabby]

“Let’s Build a Snowman” is too good for them. No, for the companies that spam and employ spammers, the endless loop of Beastmaster 2 is the fitting punishment.

[cmccurry.livejournal.com]

And that's just for the first offense. Police Academy 2-6 for second offenses. I doubt we'd have repeat offenders after that point.

[devonapple.livejournal.com]

I think they can count on new suckers.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

It's probably all of the above. I'd also put the post/success ratio at something like 100-1000 adverts to each success, AND they probably have to do extra mailings to get past spam blocking and the tendency to delete without reading.

And yeah, check out the number of currently registered internet users, and the potential pool of users. This is still a massive growth medium' so one new sucker a minute might be conservative.

On the bright side, in a few years, Chinese and African internet users will be getting urgent messages from a former governor of California who needs help with a money transfer...

[mithriltabby]

It’s probably even less than that... but it’s just too easy to do bulk spamming right now, so it’s still worthwhile for the slime.

Given the nature of spammers, though, we’ll probably just be getting a lot more spam in languages we can’t read.