An Inconvenient Truth: Spam Sells Lots of Sex and Drugs

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 20 August 2008 00:24

Business IT - Security

It is the question that everyone who stops to think about the amount of spam they get asks at least once: does anyone actually buy this stuff? The answer, it seems, is that 29 percent of us do and we are buying sex and drugs...

Internet security outfit Marshal recently conducted a poll which asked respondents if they had purchased anything as a result of spam. The surprising answer was that 29.1 percent of them actually had.

This represents a rise in the effectiveness of spam as a sales tool since an earlier poll, conducted in 2004 by Forrester Research, when only 20 percent had been tempted by the junk mail product promise. This could, of course, be a result of the increased broadband penetration in the 4 years between polls.

Marshal were not only interested in how many people were purchasing from a spam source, but also what goods and services they were buying. Perhaps less surprisingly this revealed that sex and drugs sell well online.

Sexual enhancement pills, adult material, luxury items such as watches and jewelry, plus cheap software were the main products being purchased.

Marshal Vice President Bradley Anstis says “The poll highlights an inconvenient truth. Many of us often question ourselves, why is there so much spam? The answer is, enough people are purchasing products from spam to make it a worthwhile and profitable endeavour for spammers.”
 
“Spam is commonly believed to attract very low response rates" Anstis continues "Estimates indicate there is often less than ten purchases made for every million spam messages sent. But most of these messages are blocked by spam filters. This means the actual response rates are much higher if you only count those emails that make it into a person’s inbox.”
 
While industry estimates do indeed vary, the consensus of opinion seems to be that at least 150 billion spam messages are circulating on a daily basis, accounting for in excess of 85 percent of all email at any given time. Spam consumes bandwidth and costs everyone in terms of time wasted and money spent fighting it.

That's before you even consider the increasing security threat, with spam now being responsible for distributing malware at a rate of knots.

How much does it cost to send a million spam messages? Learn the shocking truth on page 2...

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