Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Perhaps the most poignant spams are the inventions -- products spawned from toilet-seat epiphanies and household frustrations, hawked by entrepreneurs in far-off countries and housewives hoping to turn their brainstorms into some extra cash. Witness the Phone Cushion, which is marketed by one Tabitha K as "an incredibly soft foam pad that easily attaches to your hard telephone earpiece" that will help me weather those long days on the phone. (Tabitha, however, doesn't respond to my e-mail asking for more information.) There are cable TV descrambler gadgets, and something called the Liquor Gauge which will help ensure that my staff isn't stealing my cognac.
The winner of the most-cheery-spam award: the Enviro Fan, a water-powered bathroom fan sold by an Australian firm. If such environmental concern weren't endearing enough, this spam actually includes emoticon drawings:
\\\\|//// \ ~ ~ / / @ @ \***************************o000--(_)--000o**************************
The vast majority of the spam I sifted through had URLs that were broken -- queer misshapen things like http://3463729345/11.html or http:CDPROMOTION.homestead.com/, which I can tell just by looking at them will lead nowhere. Others offer to sell their products on sites that are yanked by angry ISPs just hours after the spams go out -- many ISPs quickly terminate accounts and shut down Web pages of customers who are spamming. Only a handful of the URLS in the spams I received actually led to active sites.
A lot of spammers don't seem to get the medium at all and want you to print out forms and mail in money to anonymous P.O. boxes or suspicious-sounding companies. Others beg you to e-mail them for more information. I e-mailed 12 of these spammers, but none responded; four of the e-mails eventually bounced back, the accounts abruptly terminated.
Yet other spams -- mostly the get-rich-quick schemes -- want you to call an 800 number and leave a message. First, of course, I have to choose between making $10,000 in 30-45 days, $2,000-$3,000 a week, $46,000 in less than 90 days, $50,000 in 90 days, $20,000 per month or up to $250,000 -- all from companies who fail to explain what, exactly, I'll have to do to earn that money. Oh, the agony of decision! I made five phone calls to this genre of spammers, and only one person returned my call: a rather nice young man at a company that hawks a series of promotional tapes teaching you how to make a fortune. But this gentleman, Chris Orr, when I told him I was actually a reporter rather than a potential sucker, quickly tried to get off the phone. I'd need to talk to his boss, he said.
Still, I wheedled some details from Orr: This was the third e-mail he'd crafted for this product), he said, and the wording he'd used this time seemed to be generating a good response. "There are a lot of people doing bulk e-mail and most of them get not very good responses," he explained when I pressed. "In every business you'll get looky-loos, and your shoppers. So far with us it's a little early, but initial response has been very positive."
He promised his manager would call me to talk some more about how spamming works ("It's free press," I pleaded), but I never heard from him again. Nor did I ever get a response from the other phone calls I made. What shockingly bad business practices -- and a phenomenal waste of bandwidth to boot.
"When you do a postal snail mail direct-mail campaign, you're really happy if you get 2 percent response. Spammers can live with response rates that would put postal direct marketers out of business in a few short weeks," explains John Mozena, co-founder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. "With an unlimited dial-up account, they can send a few million messages for $20. If they are selling a widget or Viagra, the odds are that they will never deliver anything anyway -- all they want is a credit card or a check," he says.
"If they send out a million messages and only get one response, they've still made their money back plus a bit of profit," he points out. "And if you look at a million people, you'll always find one bone-dumb idiot to send off a credit card number."
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