Donncha asks, is spam self-defeating?
has anyone else noticed that the new generation of gif based stock-trading spams are getting really hard to read? In the last one I had to squint and look really carefully to find out what stock was hot and a sure-buy today!
I’ve been wondering about this, too. We continually push spammers further and further from comprehensibility, since comprehensible spam is easily-filtered spam, but the spam flood doesn’t stop. In fact, spam volumes have shot up higher than ever.
My theory is that it’s a symptom of the spam side of things being a market in itself (and an inefficient, scam-heavy one at that).
IMO, the people providing the underlying products advertised in “high-end” spam — the pill-peddlers and stock pumpers — no longer control the technical details of how or where the spam is sent. Instead, they are the customers of professional spam gangs who do that, and take care of the obfuscation, filter-evasion, etc.
In other words, the pill-peddlers and scam operators are getting ripped off, too. They think their products or scams will be advertised in a comprehensible manner, in readable emails; but instead, odd, opaque 3-word messages with “cut and paste this” lines, hidden inside filter-evasion text and bits of Project Gutenberg, are what gets delivered to the victims.
I can’t imagine the clickthrough rates are exactly stellar on that. So I’d guess the spammers are responding by pushing up volumes to attempt to increase clickthrough/sales volumes. Wonder if it’s working or not?