The BBC reports the results of a US study on the profitability of spam networks. Seven researchers set up a fake pharmacutecal website and used the Storm network to drive traffic to it through spam messages.
Out of nearly 350 million messages sent 28 people attempted to buy something which the researchers estimate would have returned about $US 100 a day.
Not bad money, but hardly worth the effort of setting up a fake site, arranging the merchant facilities and getting on to the Storm botnet.
The return also assumes all the potential purchases were genuine. There’s a good chance many of them would have been fraudulent which would have further eroded the returns.
If those returns are typical, then we’re probably seeing the end of the mass spam, although I’m worried that a new breed of 419 type scammers might take advantage of people in financial straits as the economy worsens.
The full study is available at the UCSD website.