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February 12, 2003

Unsolicited Commercial Idiots

Hilarious story in Wired News today in which they try to buy things mentioned in spam. Maybe it's ironic instead of hilarious: most attempts to buy or get more info fail, but their addresses get resold to other spammers. Is there an entire spam-to-spam industry in which people are moving chits around representing money for email addresses? Possibly. The stuff they do manage to buy is mostly classified-ad fraud/misrepresentation stuff practically: photocopied instructions that tell you how to perpetuate what the spammers are doing or information that's available for free (and not a 10th-generation blur).

Posted by Glennf at February 12, 2003 7:34 AM

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The implicit good news in the article is that a significant part of the spam industry might have the characteristics of a fad/pyramid scheme, which suggests that at some point it might just naturally burn itself out as people come to realize that there's no real money in it.

Posted by: alkali at February 13, 2003 12:05 PM

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