The spam volume currently stands at a whopping 98 billion per day worldwide. And it’s growing at 12% month over month since 2007. If no one clicks on those dud messages, then why people still keep sending them? And how they are earning? So let’s find out how spammers make money.

Selling emails: -

A significant number of spammers apparently aren’t at all interested in whether anyone buys their wares. They will, in fact, keep minting money even if you never click on any of the spam emails. How? They simply feed off other spammers in a bizarre cannibalistic pyramid scheme of spinning money. Most spammers make money selling email addresses to other spammers, who then sell that same address to others and so on

Replying to spam will always result in more spam. In fact, you would find that maximum numbers of spammers never reply to your request for more information on their product or service .that’s because they make money on customers’ email address, which is sold to other spammers who in turn again simply pass along the address to still other spammers.

Most interesting thing, some of these addresses finally also land them into actual legitimate business – people with a real product to sell who were actually interested in selling them. since there are several layers to this spam scam , most of these legitimate business people don’t even know that the recipient hadn’t requested their sales pitch, because whoever sold them the email addresses in the first place had assured them the recipients wanted the information.

Hidden Risk: -

The biggest number, of course, was found to be that of spam mails with offers for pornography, which consistently delivered exactly the sort of material they promised. But even these came with nasty pop-up ad-producing spyware, and the inbox was crammed with X-rated spam that would singe the retinas of all but the most jaded viewer. Worse , they opened up a backdoor to the computers with various codes that did everything from copying important data from your pc into a zombie that deliver more spam to random address to all over world.

According to one survey,” one in 10 web pages are infected with malicious code.70% of web-based infection were found on ‘legitimate’ websites. An estimated 5% of heavily trafficked websites have some sort of threat associated with them- ranging from adware to malicious spyware.” For instance on Indian websites, malicious content was found embedded in sites like www.delhi-tourism-india.com/culture, www.zeeinternational.co.in,www.bmaindia.com and also some well know banks who have since taken down the culprit script

Scam spam: -

There is a good percent of spam messages that obviously still turn out to be brilliant scams. For example IronPort Systems came across was where the ads spoke about a Canadian Pharmacy, this sold $129.95 bottle of the ‘Erection pack’, which consisted of two packs of sexual stimulants ,’viagra’ and ‘cialis’. The best part was a slick legitimate-looking pharmacy site called ‘MyCanadianPharmacy’. This came with a legitimate address and ‘contacts us’ sections.

The spammers had not only gone to the trouble of making a legitimate looking website, but had also actually set up a delivery system which was traced back to a garage in India. A smalltime company in India was hired to package some tablets that were crammed with enough herbal stimulants to keep person generally charged up for days. This package even included the return address of this place in goregaon, Mumbai.

Tools for them:-

Spamming professionals are getting even more sophisticated by the day. For example spam tool company, RAT System, which is an outfit that has released a “basic Trojan package” addressing the general audience. The tool kit contains various components to facilitate the creation, distribution, and maintenance of Trojan programs, the Trojans created by this kit contain functionality to steal information from various banking and financial websites. They also have a backdoor that allows attacker to issue commands to the Trojan at the later date. To top of it off, they have built-in mechanism to avoid detection and removal by security softwares.

And spammers are just getting savvier with making use of audio and video clips as spam tools embedded with malicious content.