At the peak of his power, Ed says he pulled in US$10,000 to $15,000 a week, storing the money in $20 bills in stacks of boxes. Now he’s released a book on how he did it, Inside the Spam Cartel: Trade Secrets from the Dark Side.
The amazon Reviews look good, some excerpts include:
Reading ‘Inside the Spam Cartel’ (ITSC) is like watching a racing car crash; you’re horrified to see it happen, but you can’t take your eyes off it. ITSC exposes spam from the point of view of the ‘enemy’ — a spammer who claims ‘you need to be ruthless in this industry if you want to make any money at it’.
This book is written from the first-person perspective of a spammer, and goes into great detail about the mentality and technology of spamming. Whether Spammer-X is a real person or not is irrelevant. The information is excellent and will definitely aid anyone who is responsible for combatting spam in an organization. He covers everything from how spammers make their money, how they hide their tracks, what technology they use to send out the mailings, and what techniques are used to prevent the money from being tracked.
From the Yahoo Article, this guy seems like the real deal.
He spent 10 hours a day, seven days a week studying how to send spam and avoid filtering technologies in security software designed to weed out garbage e-mail. Most spam filters are effective 99 percent of the time; he aimed for that remaining window, using tricks such as including slightly different images in his spam, which can fool filters into thinking the e-mail is legitimate.
“The better I got at spam, the more money I made,” Ed said.
He would start a spam run by finding an online merchant who wanted to sell a product. Then he’d acquire a list of e-mail addresses– another commodity that has spawned its own market in the world of spam. He’d also set up a domain name, included as a link in a spam message, that, if clicked, would redirect the recipient to the merchant’s Web site, enabling Ed to get credit for the referral.
The spam would then be sent from a network of hacker-controlled computers, called botnets. Those machines are often consumer PCs infected with malicious software that a hacker can control. Ed would “rent” time on those computers from another group of hackers that specialized in creating botnets.
If one of the spam recipients bought something, Ed would get a percentage of the sale. For pharmaceuticals the commission was around 50 percent, he said.
Response rates to spam tend to be a fraction of 1 percent. But Ed said he once got a 30 percent response rate for a campaign. The product? A niche type of adult entertainment: photos of fully clothed women popping balloons.
I just ordered the book, Inside the Spam Cartel: Trade Secrets from the Dark Side, I let you know if it’s any good in a couple of weeks.
5 Responses to “Inside the Spam Cartel: Trade Secrets from the Dark Side”
Maybe someday . . . when i retire.
Yeah… when you’re no longer top dog 
[…] Hoje cruzei com um artigo que traz luz a essa questão, falando sobre um livro recém-lançado, escrito por um ex-spammer, que assina como Spammer-X. […]
Actually, one could very easily make a book on those topics using the various black-hat forums. Most people who are the best at what they do, do not wish to drive in paltry sales from books. If you’re totally godly *cough* Quad *cough, you’ll likely not wish to help others, unless of course it proves profitable. The perfect book for now would have to be a huge section of black-hat tactics with full stories and ideas completely condensed. Quad, stick with your special tactics. Also, when something hits mainstream, that’s when it is dumbed down.
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It’s a shame it only covers email spam. I think an exposé on a successful search spammer would be much more interesting: the mass splog building, XSSs, parasite hosting, link spamming, content scraping, Adsense abuse, fake search engines, etc.