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RE: Computer Question -- Spoofed e-mails

To: <shop-talk@autox.team.net>
Subject: RE: Computer Question -- Spoofed e-mails
From: "Mullen, Tim" <Tim.Mullen@ngc.com>
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2007 11:12:19 -0500
Shannah Miller wrote:
>
> Actually, the vast majority of your spam
> comes from people who are incredibly stupid.

I would respectfully contradict this statement.

I'm ashamed to say, I have a nephew that used to be in the spamming
business.  He's the smart one, that "worked" about 10 hours a week. The
one that has a nice new house with swimming pool, ski boat, SUVs, BMWs,
Jetskis, dirt bikes, and a sand rail.  Lots of money stored away in his
various investments.  Depending on their point of view, members of the
family either are proud of him (he makes lots of money) or are ashamed
of him (I work with computers for a living).

Thankfully, he has mostly gotten out of the business, and now designs
web sites, hosts web sites for businesses, etc.  He went "legit".

> There are people making money spamming.  They
> are the ones getting others to spam for them.

He made money doing both.

> In rare cases there are spammers making money
> on people dumb enough to buy their products,
> but that is more rare.

You'd be surprised how much money is made by the people dumb enough to
buy from the spammers, especially if they are actually selling products
and deliver and not just scamming people.

You don't have to sell to everyone that you send the spam to, but even
if only a tenth of a percent of the people buy your product, when you
sent out 50 million emails, you make a lot of money (50,000 responses).
And you can have several "spasm" going at the same time, and a new one
every couple of days/weeks.  It doesn't take much work to do it, the
computer programs do it for you automatically.  You set it up, start the
process, and go boating for a coupe of days.

> As long as there are lazy and stupid people, there
> will be spam of some sort. It's the same deal with
> telemarketers: as long as people are dumb enough to
> buy from telemarketers, there will be telemarketers.

Yep.  Like PT Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute.
Unfortunately there are several million suckers out there.

Tim Mullen - NOT a spammer...




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