On Fri, 28 Feb 2003 20:40:03 -0500, Samuel W. Heywood wrote:
> I wonder if the Nigerian spammers have programmed some machines to > scan all the messages from all the various mailing lists to search > for the term "Nigeria". Maybe it is their idea that if the word is > found on the messages posted on a mailing list, then the subscribers > to that mailing list might be interested in investing in some > Nigerian business ventures. Maybe that explains why some mailing > lists are being targetted for Nigerian spams. The "Nigerian spammers" are worldwide and the emails come in many varieties. Lots of individuals try this scam out. They buy a CD with email addresses and go to work. Most of the money is made by those who sell the CD's of email addresses. Before the Internet the same dynamic was at work with chain letters, pyramid schemes and other "opportunity seeking" businesses. Most of the money was made by promoting the idea that you could make money easily with various mail order schemes. Lists of names were gathered and sold and resold and resold again. Once you got on a list you would get dozens of the same letter over and over again. One started "Hi, my name is Dave Rhodes". It was famous and circulated for years in terrific abundance. The "Nigerian spam scam" is the same kind of thing. It's easy now to harvest names for spam with programs that crawl the web. The Arachne list is archived on the web, so our addresses get harvested. Once on a spam list our addresses will get circulated over and over, being sold and resold, traded around among the spammmers who come and go--most of them being suckered by those who sell names and other services to the fools who send out the spam in hopes of getting rich. Almost no money is being made by the people who send out the spam, just as almost no money was made by those who sent out chain letters. The money is made by those selling lists and services as there is a ready market fueled by greed and stupidity. -- Arachne V1.70;rev.3, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
