Why do people send spam?

I don't get it. It seems that it would be almost not worth it due to people being smarter now about emails they receive, better tools available to providers to fight it and better email spam filtering yet anyone who I have talked to in this industry says it's a big problem. It must obviously be worth it to some people but I don't see how. Is it for 3rd worlders only who think they can get rich off a $3 VPS? I'm just trying to understand what motivates someone to do this.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

If you get a few people to buy your $75 knock off Ray Bans (and actually ship it to them), you could make a few hundred dollars. If you're sending your e-mails to hundreds of thousands of people, odds are, a few will go to your site. It's all about numbers.

If you throw enough shit at the wall, some of it will stick.

GaleDribble said:

..people being smarter now about emails they receive, better tools available to providers to fight it and better email spam filtering..

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Hahaha no. I bet you don't work in IT. I meant IT that support average user, not dedicated sysadmin or developer.

You read about BOFH or lusers and think thats funny, I live in that world.

Its the same pattern every year. I don't see people being smarter at all. In fact, I think people are getting dumber as "it just works" mentality start creeping in. No basic understanding on what is firewall or antivirus as "my Mac just works". Spam email works on those people is no surprise to me.

/rant

Just one reason: money.

Maybe they will scam, maybe they will sell something, maybe.... but I'm sure they will get money from that.

Simply:

1) To make money

But even better:

Send spam to unsuspecting people whom are not tech savvy, then have them click a link to "claim their prize" direct that link to a phishing site with a exploit kit iframe in background, steal banking info PLUS infect their computer.

They do it (both email SPAM and comment SPAM) for money. The big time ROKSO spammers (like ColoCrossing's favorite customer Yair Shalev who was indicted for fraud by the FTC) are making millions annually

There was a study last year that showed that Facebook comment SPAM alone (SPAM posted on comments on profiles, etc) generates $200 million in annual revenues for spammers.

Spammers posting links on Facebook fan pages to send people to third-party scam sites are earning $200m every year, according to calculations by a team of Italian security researchers who have investigated hundreds of thousands of posts on the social network.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/28/facebook-spam-202-million-italian-research

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For anyone who is interested, here is a research paper "The Economics of SPAM" co-written by a couple of Microsoft and Google employees (25 page .pdf ...omg it has paragraphs!):

http://www.davidreiley.com/papers/SpamEconomics.pdf

The researchers in that paper estimate that SPAM costs American businesses and consumers $20 BILLION annually (I know dealing with  email and comment SPAM costs my company quite a bit annually in both mitigation costs, cleanup costs, lost productivity --> tl.dr die spammers, die ).  They also estimate that 88% of the 90 billion emails sent worldwide daily are SPAM.

edited to add this quote from that research paper:

The single most effective weapon in the spam blocking arsenal turns out to be blacklisting an email server...

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Money!

They simply use VPS or DEDI's. Though the more professional crews use ssh RSA keys to control. Magically always connect with the same VPN attached to the customer to connect either to server or our customer panel. I never caught different IP's or Paypal for the same (spamming) customers. Even the abuse stay empty on these type of guys.

Noob spammers tho, gosh. Philippines guys ordering with cheese IP different Paypal user and sign up with the same IP's. We simply report these account to Paypal and send an abuse to their ISP. And if they find a whole in our checking the abuse box floods within hours > terminated. Sadly this is reality these days and especially during x-mas time.

Judging by my spam folder, the root cause of spam is that there is a tragic surplus of young, attractive women in the world.  They are all very desperate to meet middle-aged men like me.  

These woman appear to have some issues.  For example, they also seem uninterested in any sort of relationship but want to skip directly to carnal frolicking.  They are also quite wiling to share immodest pictures of themselves on the Internet.

So I guess spam is their only faint hope for happiness.

No matter home many times you tell people not to click on untrusted links - some will do it anyway.

It's like putting a giant red button in front of a kid and telling them not to press it. It's human nature - they can't resist!

Bahahah @ the OP.  You my friend have industry blindness from too much trench time.  Everyone who isn't a GNU'nerd is suspect to clicking on spam.  Heck I get spams all the time from my non technical friends.  Has their name and all on the spams.  Easy to fall for the bait, especially where you aren't suspicious of everything and distrusting naturally. (shh quit making fun of me).

Spam = money and lots of it.  That's what SPAM is all about.  Nothing else.

Sure you need to send many millions of spam per day.  Yes, the actual buy rate from such is low.

You also have spammers who are selling counterfeit goods and those selling illegal goods (i.e illegal drugs).  Then there are spammers who are running fancy identification theft rackets...

A small scale spammer is going to be pushing < $1 million a year in sales (doesn't take long to ramp up to that ceiling).   Rates for him are likely high on IP, servers and whack a mole with constant server setups and long hours stringing the bullshit together.  He might be spending $200k a year on server and related costs, most spending about half of that I'd say.

Larger outfits are even more profitable.

A $3 VPS is just one of MANY machines in a spam operation.  No real spam operation is running things off a VPS since  all those spams create server issues and such an environment should have caps and monitoring in place to regulate such fun.

Interesting and related research paper: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/Oakland11.pdf

Yeah, money makes the world go round and people will do anything to make it or take it.

For,

PPC

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ParkInHost said:

For,

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As you can see some people hire bots to post on forums like ParkInHost. Hurry and get that post count up so you can spam us.

KuJoe said:

As you can see some people hire bots to post on forums like ParkInHost. Hurry and get that post count up so you can spam us.

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Are you sure? I have enough post count if i want to spam here.. nevertheless whats the cause for spam?

Thanks everyone. It seemed useless as I never get spam (to inbox) and when I do it's usually broke English by what I imagine is a 3rd worlder sitting on a dirt floor hoping to make a dollar or two. Why do more hosts not limit/restrict email delivery if it's as a big of a problem as some say? How come ISPs and email companies aren't better at eliminating and even tracking spammers?

for the money, advertising, viruses ...

We can only hope people have become smarter these days when it comes to spam emails. I myself receive well into the thousands of spam emails per week unfortunately. The best way to help stop the spam is as a hosting provider, submit firm abuse reports to the IP whois registrant and hope they actually care enough to investigate. In most cases it does work, just takes a lot of time. 

Today's reason for sending spam... forum spam... is... GVH needs money.