By Dan Seitz
We’ve all seen it; messages in our inbox with subject lines like “FrE3 V1AgRa!” or “Don’t Let Her Down, Sloopy” (for the purposes of the Internet, my name is Sloopy Hangon. You’d be surprised how many people don’t get it). You’ve wondered: how many people actually click on these stupid things? And do they actually make money?
Chris Kanich, a graduate student at UC San Diego, wanted to know too. Kanich is building an impressive academic career studying spam, and one of his key efforts was figuring out how much a spam provider makes per day. In his paper, “Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain”, he lays out how it works and what the profit ultimately is for the purveyors of sugar pills.
First, there’s the emails. Spammers use vast, enslaved networks of computers called “botnets” to send out spam emails: if you don’t run your anti-virus software regularly and download things from peer-to-peer networks, you might be part of one yourself. Botnet members have no idea they’re sending spam: it’s all done under their nose, with their Internet connection. A typical botnet sends 1.7 million messages a day.
Of those, most don’t get through: more than 75% of the messages are to dead email addresses, leaving just 23.8% to actually make it to a live box. Of those, maybe a quarter survive the spam filter (nobody is actually sure, and each email provider has different spam killing methods), and actually make it to an inbox. We’re down to about 100,000 messages, now, depending on the filter.
Of those, 0.0127% actually visit the site, and .0266% of those decide to buy their drugs from an untrustworthy source. Meaning, of 1.7 million messages sent out, there are approximately 33 to 57 suckers will to part with their hard-earned money in order to avoid filling out a simple medical questionnaire. Bottles cost anywhere from $70 to $225, with a rough average of $150
Ultimate payout? $4,000 to $7,000, on average, per day, with the scale leaning more towards $7,000.
And how much did they invest, between the website, the botnet, and the pills? The botnet costs them nothing: you’re paying the bill on that one, which is why anti-spam legislation is so prominent. But let’s say he’s got a nice connection, he’s probably paying about $50 a month for it, so $1.33 a day. Your average sugar pill costs a penny a pill; the bottle sets them back more. That’s roughly $1. Websites cost as little as $9 a month to host and run.
So, they’ll spend $40 to $70 a day…and get back one hundred times their investment. Even better (for them) is that if the mark realizes he’s been tricked, he’ll almost never go to the police…and if he does, the fraud is so small, and they’re so untraceable, most police will take a report and nothing will come of it.
Think that’s bad? There’s no quality control on these dummy pills: some will simply dye and resell old medication so that the drug will have some effect. In Singapore, fake Viagra was sold in the area contaminated with a powerful diabetes control drug, Glyburide, putting 150 men in the hospital and killing four of them. There have been reports of amphetamine being used, which puts many users at risk, especially older patients.
In short, it’s a good thing so few people buy these pills; the cost to their pride is nothing next to the possible cost to their health.
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