Tag: spam

DIY Phone Farmers

D’Alesandro’s $2000 a month revenue high didn’t last. In 2018, there was a “very sharp downfall”. Advertisers started to crack down. “I think the people putting money into it weren’t exactly sure how it was being used,” he added. In December, D’Alesandro posted his last video to YouTube. In the video description he wrote, “It’s been a great ride, but I feel I need to quit now and focus on other things to grow as a person.” Other farmers have felt the dip too. Goat_City, the farmer who had over 100 phones, is only making around $10 a day now. CallMeDonCheadle took a break after the profits over the past couple of years decreased dramatically. “It has a lot to do with it being less passive and admittedly I can sympathize now that I have a job. Not everyone wants to spend their free time clicking at screens to make fractions of pennies every hour, especially if they have families, friends, and living life in general to attend to.”

Chain Letter Evolution

Apocryphal letters claiming divine origin circulated for centuries in Europe. After 1900, shorter more secular letters appeared in the US that promised good luck if copies were distributed and bad luck if not. Billions of these “luck chain letters” circulated in the next 100 years. As they replicated through the decades, some accumulated copying errors, offhand comments, and calculated innovations that helped them prevail in the competition with other chain letters.

Lead Gen Spam

When you dial any of the listings you are put through to a sophisticated automated call tree that asks the same qualifying questions each time: if you already have insurance or no if you have been continuously insured for 12 months or no what is your zip code which insurance carrier you currently have Based on the answers the system sends you along to an insurance agent that can sell you a competing product. The idea is that if you already have Allstate and are calling for “cheap car insurance” you must want a different brand.

Inside a Facebook farm

EVERY MORNING, KIM Casipong strolls past barbed wire, 6 dogs, and a watchman in order to get to her job in a pink apartment building high above the slums in Lapu-Lapu City, Philippines. She is a pretty, milk-skinned, 17-year-old girl who loves the movie Frozen and whose favorite pastime is singing karaoke. She is on her way to do her part in bringing down Facebook.

Spam Nation

Fascinating writeup

But Krebs’s access to the inner workings of the spam underground was massively expanded when the 2 largest spam-bosses went to war against one another, paying corrupt Russian cops to investigate and incarcerate one another. Part of this war involved rival hackers breaking into one another’s internal networks and grabbing enormous troves of emails, chat-logs, and message-board databases that were fired off to law enforcement — and Krebs. From these insider resources, Krebs pieces together a gripping — and even, at times, thrilling — story about the strange business of pharmaceutical spam, an industry that is bizarre, sprawling, dysfunctional and contradictory. Fueled by world-beatingly high price of pharmaceuticals in the USA, the pharma-spam business uses millions of hacked PCs to send out come-ons advertising all manner of drugs, from anti-depression meds to fertility meds to powerful, controlled painkillers — and, of course, erectile dysfunction medication.