Who are the people sending spam and why do they keep doing it?
The answer to the ‘why’ part of the question comes down to one word: money. Very few sane people would send out millions of spam e-mail per day for the fun of it. It’s about profit.
The ‘who’ part of the question is a bit more complicated.
A very small portion of spam is sent by legitimate businesses that don’t understand or follow the 7 rules the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) laid down in the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. They didn’t intentionally set out to break the law but, through negligence, they did.
The rest of the spam that gets send daily comes from criminals. These e-mails fall in 4 basic categories:
Infection Attempts – the idea here is to provide links and attachments in the e-mails. Clicking on the attachment will get you infected. Likewise the links will lead you to a website that will also infect your computer. The bad guys have thousands of clever ways to fool you or entice you to click on a link – any link. And the minute you do you’re infected. Then your sensitive information is up for grabs. They may even attempt to control your computer remotely – to send out more spam.
Sales Attempts – The products are often drugs, jewelry or some type of body enhancement product. The prices are unbelievably low- for good reason. Many of these e-mails are simply a scam – there are no products. The rest are shoddy quality or altogether fake
Phishing Attempts – Phishing is an effort to convince you to give up sensitive information by pretending to be a legitimate organization or business such as a bank. If you are fooled into responding to these requests, your identity and money will often be stolen.
Scam Attempts – These e-mails are an effort by criminals to begin a conversation. They attempt to do this by spinning a story that hooks you with curiosity, greed compassion or other emotion. Once the conversation begins, they will spin more stories, and use promises, threats or anything else to convince you to send them money for one cause or another.
The bottom line is that it’s all about money. The fact is that these criminals are using our computers to send billions of spam messages a day. It really doesn’t cost much more to send to send10 billion per day than it costs to send 1 billion. So the question from the spammers point of view is ‘Why not?” If they get a response of 1/10th of 1% on 1 billion spam then for very little extra cost or effort, they can multiply their profit 10 times by simply sending more spam.
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