Spammers and their motivation

Added: (Tue Mar 09 2010)

Pressbox (Press Release) - AMSTERDAM, 9th of March 2010. Spammers' motivation is to gain a fortune, and obviously it works. The majority of recipients ignore the unsolicited messages, but the ones who don't and order products advertised in spam, make the whole process worthwhile. With a very low investment, spammers can create a fortune.

According to the industry figures, 1 out of the 12.500.000 spam messages that are sent, lead to a sale. Spammers get a high percentage of each sale generated . Almost all purchases are impulsive buys and among many other criteria, spammers know that credit cards makes impulsive shopping more likely.

“As long as spammers receive interaction from random recipients to whom they sent their messages, obviously this is a stimulation to continue spamming”, according to Silvia Ott from the email security concern SpamExperts. “It hardly cost anything to send out billions of spams with a single mouse-click and even sales are only in the per mill range, the mass will make it a handsome profit it minimal effort.”.

Spammers normally work with a botnet, a large network of hacked computers. They are able to control personal or company computers and seriously damage the environment in the process by keeping mailservers busy. The income of a spammer can be more than one million US dollars per year, and as long as people continue to buy via the promoted sites, cybercriminals will have an easy-way to become millionaires.