How do spammers survive?

[Deepak]

1. Everyone hates them.
2. No-one buys anything from them.

So under those conditions how do they survive? How do they earn??

 

[arjan de lumens]

AFAIK, there are actually a few people around that buy from them. Not many, something like 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000 or some small number like that. Still, filling up 9999 people's mailboxes with annoying garbage still costs so little that it is very well worth it for the 1 customer they might get - as seem from the spammers point of view

 

[rabidrabbit]

The Spammers are just a myth like Santa Claus and Tooth Faerie.
Does any adult really believe that if you give your e-mail address to a stranger, you could get spammed
It's good for scaring the kids and for camp-fire stories... "There was this guy who gave his e-mail address to a Spammer, a week later he was found spammed on his apartment, all that was left of him was in a small tin can. Nobody had heard or seen anything suspiscious from his apartment..."

 

[nutball]

Yeah, believe it or not there are some people who are naive enough to buy stuff off spammers. Just like there are people who will extract and run an exectuable from an e-mail sent to them by someone they've never heard of.

What amazes me is stories like this one:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/24/spyware_crosses_line/

So someone somewhere thinks that if they infest my computer with a virus that's impossible to remove, pops up pr0n constantly, redirects my browser to dodgy sites, etc., that I'll go "oh yeah, OK, I'll buy that for a dollar!. I guess it's the 21st century IT equivalent of the time-share villa in Spain con trick. Put enough pressure on people and they'll buy anything.

 

[Geeforcer]

That sounds an awful lot like an offshoot of the infamous CoolWebSearch, or CWS - the worst, constantly updated spyware package there is.

http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/cwschronicles.html

 

[Guden Oden]

LOLFL @ Rabid!

Yeah, that's the problem with people - they're so damn superstitious!