Legal Research

One Response for Every 12.5 Million Emails and Spammers Still Make $7,000 a Day [UPDATED]

The BBC reports on a study by the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley and the Computer Science and Engineering Department of UCSD on spam conversions — people who actually click on a link in a spam email in order to buy what’s being offered.

The researchers infiltrated the Storm botnet in order to measure spam delivery, click-through and conversion for a fake pharmaceutical site they had created.  (They didn’t actually let the sales go through, so people didn’t lose money as a result of this test.)  Their results:

“After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted — a conversion rate of well under 0.00001%.  Of these, all but one were for male-enhancement products and the average purchase price was close to $100.  Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88 — a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period or $140 per day for periods when the campaign was active.  However, our study interposed on only a small fraction of the overall Storm network — we estimate roughly 1.5 percent based on the fraction of worker bots we proxy.  Thus, the total daily revenue attributable to Storm’s pharmacy campaign is likely closer to $7000 (or $9500 during periods of campaign activity).”

OK, work through this with me: 350 million emails divided by 28 suckers gives you 12.5 million.  So the response rate is 1 for every 12.5 million spam emails.  And that 1 fool accounts for $100.  So if the spammers are indeed making $7,000 a day, there must be 70 fools a day.  Which means they must be sending out at least 875 million (12.5 million x 70) spam messages daily.

Sheesh.

Update, 3:14 PM - Ken Snyder, our IT manager, tells me my estimate may be a little low.  If you divide 350 million by 26 (the number of days the test ran), you get 13.5 million emails per day.  Since the researchers estimated that they were using about 1.5% of bot capacity, the number of daily spam emails must be closer to 900 million.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on November 10, 2008 (boomark / email).