Are you one in 12.5 million?

Like many of you, I've wondered how on earth people can fall prey to some of the spam email that fills inboxes world-wide on a regular basis. Turns out some really smart researchers at the University of California in Berkeley and UC, San Diego wondered the same thing (really I'm just impressed they managed to put down the bongs and fish tacos long enough to get some work done). The researchers hijacked part of a giant spam network and, in effect, became proxy spammers. They even set up a fake pharmacy web-site that claimed to sell an herbal supplement to increase libido!

Which makes me feel extra bad for the people who get conned by these spammers. Besides being hopelessly gullible, they are apparently sexually frustrated and too ashamed to try legitimate medical solutions for their problems. Like Horny Goat Weed. Fortunately, our benevolent spam researchers had their scam set up so an error message would pop up whenever someone tried to enter a credit card number.

Their research determined that it took 12.5 million emails to achieve one sale. On their network, this boiled down to about one sale a day. They calculate that big spammers, like the one they infiltrated, make roughly $3,500,000 a year. Which is actually less than what people had been speculating.

You can read more here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7719281.stm