Subject: Re: [Asrg] News Article - Microsoft and spam

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 10:57:47 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>

> ...
> I was wondering about that as well. Would hiring people for go through the 
> human interface test increases the costs for spammers? Does it matter since 
> the cost is so small anyway? What about in a C/R system where a human 
> interface test is used, would spammers actually go ahead and hire people to 
> pass the test from each bounced message?

Let's do some arithmetic.  At $10/hour and 10 seconds per challenge
answered or account created, the cost would be about $0.03 address.
That sounds a little but not very high to send mail until the
challenge whitelist entry is deleted by the spam target.  It sounds
low for a valid sender account that can be used for millions of
messages for days until the free provider notices enough bounces
or receives a complaint and terminates it.

Free providers often impose delays of more than 10 seconds for
account creation.  That can be handled by giving your $10/hour
employees big monitors and have them run several windows simultaneously
to overlap with the delays.  Pay them by the account created or
challenge answered to keep them busy.  Use software to automate
most of the process, including counting and checking the work.
Don't worry about the U.S.  labor laws about piece work, since
you're probably breaking lots of other laws.

I wonder how much of the flood of "work at home" spam today involves
free mail account creation jobs?

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

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From: Dave Aronson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 14:43:16 -0400

> or receives a complaint and terminates it.

Does anybody have any actual numbers on how good a return spammers get on 
their spam, in terms of, say, cents per thousand spams?  I suspect this 
will be very hard to measure for spam that works indirectly (like 
getting people to go to a URL that does not have an embedded tracking 
number), and vastly different per category, but there may be SOME hard 
data out there....

 > account creation.

Heck, that much delay can be imposed by normal data processing, web 
congestion, etc....

 > That can be handled by giving your $10/hour
 > employees big monitors and have them run several windows
 > simultaneously to overlap with the delays.

I don't think it need even require large monitors and manual task 
switching.  It should be relatively simple (i.e., at most a month's 
programming) to automate everything but the image interpretation.  If it 
presents a steady stream of images to a human, it could get the time 
each down to maybe two or three seconds.  Within a minute, I've thought 
of a whole architecture for such a system, with modular screen parsing 
for different providers, and configgable so you can keep up with changes 
in their screens.  Of course I'll leave it as an exercise for the 
lurking spammers and spam-symps, but I can easily imagine someone 
writing this sucker and selling it to spammers.

-- 
David J. Aronson, Unemployed Software Engineer in the Washington DC area
See http://destined.to/program/ for online resume and other information.

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From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 15:12:56 -0400

>number), and vastly different per category, but there may be SOME hard
[..]

There was a news article a while back somewhere about the Iraq playing 
cards that were made by some company. It had some financial figures.

Yakov

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From: "C. Wegrzyn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 15:17:08 -0400

I heard the number as 1% conversion rate: for every 100 messages sent, 
99 will reject it and 1 will buy it!

Chuck

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From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 13:47:52 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Dave Aronson <[email-masked]>

> number), and vastly different per category, but there may be SOME hard 

I suspect anyone who claims to be able to answer that question is
either a spammer and so a pathological, unbelievable lier, or a
poseur of a lier.  The amount of lawbreaking in spam ensures that
those who really and actually make a profit will keep quiet.

Occassionally there are hints of believable numbers, such as the recent
excitement about the money made by selling "Iraq playing cards."
See http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~1443978,00.html
and http://www.iht.com/articles/99019.htm
However, such notes are so rare that they only show how little is known.

It's worth distinguishing between the senders of bulk email who
charge for that service and those who hope to get rich selling whatever.

> Heck, that much delay can be imposed by normal data processing, web 

That's most of what I meant.

> writing this sucker and selling it to spammers.

Or again, selling it to "home workers" via spam.

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From: "Chris Lewis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 17:28:03 -0400

Dave Aronson wrote:
> their spam, in terms of, say, cents per thousand spams?

They vary all over the map.  Betterly talked about making 5 $300 sales 
from a million spams.  One of the reported "takes" from the IRAQ playing 
cards spammer was on the order of $18 for several million spams.

Note that MSN's DAV system has had a 100/day limit for a long while. 
They appeared to implement the human test a week or so ago. (volume 
dropped off from about 20,000 per day to a handful).

A little bird talked about DAV abusers registering thousands of accounts 
at a time.

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From: Barry Shein <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 17:44:09 -0400

> cards that were made by some company. It had some financial figures.

I'd like to see some harder data, like a signed tax form for a company
which made most of its income on spam, an SEC filing, etc.

I just have a little trouble believing what a marketeer tells a news
reporter about how great business is, particularly when they figure
they might have an interest.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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