Time4aNAP
Premium
join:2007-04-09
Des Plaines, IL
| reply to MooJohn
Re: If people are still getting spam..
said by MooJohn  :It's not the people receiving spam that we should care about. It's the idiots that are responding to it and buying whatever it's got for sale who are perpetuating the problem. That would appear to be sound reasoning. And it is the prevailing school of thought on the matter. However I have good reason to believe that in fact, the biggest dupes are the spammers themselves, and that few if any spam solicitations are taken seriously.
Anybody who has monitored spam activity over the years has noticed that spam sent to Americans has shifted away from domestic get rich quick schemes, towards increasingly isolated foreign sources. What's more, the pitches are gaining a distinct bumpkin quality that indicates a trend away from spammers being familiar with their targets. Heck, most of the spammers that I see today can't even manage to get the right character set, much less a single word of english!
Back when there was a majority of native US spammers, I had several occasions to engage in conversation with a few who stumbled into mailing lists. Any illusions that I had held about spamming being a slick corporate marketing tool were quickly dashed. They were genuinely baffled as to why a single e-mail address could generate so much retaliation; they were so clueless that they had no idea that a legitimate use for mass mailings even existed. And these were the Americans, the ones who look downright sophisticated in comparison to the current crop!
One common excuse emerged: "I bought this CD that was guaranteed to be full of e-mail addresses of (suckers)." Anyone who has browsed the back pages of computer magazines has seen the ads for these lists. It became pretty obvious to me who the biggest suckers were. These CDs were being sold at prices ranging from several hundred to several thousand dollars apiece! It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realize what happens when the would-be direct marketing mogul finds out that he's been taken. It's nothing more than a new twist on the old "plans for guaranteed income, send $1 to..." scheme.
So what happens when every shady character in America knows about the latest grift? The last suckers who still want to recoup their losses must look abroad for a fresh crop of dupes. Of course, news travels fast in the Free World, so the next targets, and therefore sources of spam, tended to be ex-Soviet-Bloc countries that have been isolated from the news of the world until just recently, and to third world areas that are flush with drug money, but still mostly illiterate.
The final frontier is Communist China. And, as the chart clearly shows, there's a gold rush going on there. China is the perfect market for peddling spam schemes to. It's still isolated from reality by a well-entrenched totalitarian government. And the same government is fighting the Cold War with a clever new strategy: beat the West at its own game, namely capitalism. Here we have the world's most populous nation that is now wealthy enough to build a large-scale Internet infrastructure that is engineered to keep the truth from flowing in, but allow the BS to spew outwards unfettered, through huge new backbones.
The totalitarian regime in Communist China has the power of censorship, so it will be a long, long time before all six billion Chinese subjects learn that sending spam is a sucker's game. In the meantime, that leaves a whole lot of people with hopes and dreams to be unwitting soldiers in a massive passive-aggressive virtual invasion of the USA for many years to come. |
