You've Got Jail!
2004-06-23 22:51:22.998611+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments
AOL employee fired and arrested for theft of screen names of 92 million AOL subscribers, that list was then used as a mailing list for unsolicited commercial email.
2004-06-23 22:51:22.998611+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments
AOL employee fired and arrested for theft of screen names of 92 million AOL subscribers, that list was then used as a mailing list for unsolicited commercial email.
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#Comment Re: made: 2004-06-25 15:59:29.271135+00 by: petronius
A report on NPR said that this guy only got about $56k for the disk, and I presume that after being in circulation for 18 months you can probably buy the list from a pushcart in Guangdong for $2 today. Which goes to show the strange economics of spam. The traffic and annoyance quotients of spam are very high, but the individual worth of the information is very low. As are the costs of distribution.
Some years ago I did some work that included direct mail to members of medical societies, selling them convention tapes. I learned a lot about the direct mail business, and the holy grail was the perfectly qualified customer: a person favorably disposed to both buying the product and ordering it via mail or phone (two very different issues). Names of people who had made such purchases in the last 60 days were gold. Why? Because sending out even a simple flyer on non-profit bulk mail cost ~24 cents.
But with spam sending out a million messages cost little more than sending out 100. Which means that the concept of qualification is irrelevant. A direct mail solicitation that got a 3% reply rate would be a masterpiece. What is considered a good return for spam? .0001%?