As a famous person on these here interwebs*, I get a lot of spam. A lot. Seriously, my email address and the email address of the forty billion blogs I operate/write for are out there and begging to be attacked by spammers; I mean, my mom gets like 200 disgustingly perverse emails per day, so yeah, it’s not that surprising at all.
What is surprising is that these mf’ers are making a killing off of the spam industry. That’s right. People actually respond to that shit.
A new study details how spammers – the bane of our email inboxes – still make pots of money, despite only receiving a response to one in every 12,500,000 emails they spam out.
“After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted,” says the research paper.
Yet even with this apparently abysmal response rate of less than 0.00001 per cent, the researchers still estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or $3.5m (£2.21m) over a year.
Three. Point. Five. Million. Dollars. Per. Year.
You spamming sons of bitches. Of course, there’s always going to be a market for perverts trying to wrangle up some cheap erectile dysfunction drugs so I kind of understand that. And I would imagine they’re probably counting the guys who send out the Trojan viruses and bankroll on some credit card information in that number as well, which probably seriously alters the totals.
But you know what, gentlemen? That doesn’t really excuse you bombarding my inbox with a bunch of Chinese symbols. No, seriously. I’m fine with the “BAD economy? Low salary? Buy an University Dip1oma/Bacheelor from us, No Study/Exam needed ihuq uhk” (although, Yukuro, the least you could do is BCC me so I don’t get the Reply All bullshit too) and the “Stir up a passion in her heart with your magic wand zxog wtutwx nig” (Ro-wr) but can’t you at least pretend like you know who you’re spamming? We all know I don’t read Chinese, you rich bastards.
*Figment of Brinson’s imagination
