If you’ve ever pondered into the deep, dark depths of your spam folder, you would’ve likely noticed a mountain of emails advertising viagra and other such pharmaceuticals. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you ever clicked on the link?
A recent interesting study, looking at the economics of spam-based advertising, highlights this journey — a snapshot of which can be seen in the image above.
Highlights from the study include:
- 95% of products are monetized using merchant services from a handful of banks
- The credit-card transactions were the “choke-point”
- Out of the 120 purchases, 76 were authorised, 56 settled and all but 7 were delivered
I include here the abstract for your consumption:
Abstract—Spam-based advertising is a business. While it has engendered both widespread antipathy and a multi-billion dollar anti-spam industry, it continues to exist because it fuels a profitable enterprise. We lack, however, a solid understanding of this enterprise’s full structure, and thus most anti-spam interventions focus on only one facet of the overall spam value chain (e.g., spam filtering, URL blacklisting, site takedown). In this paper we present a holistic analysis that quantifies the full set of resources employed to monetize spam email— including naming, hosting, payment and fulfilment—using extensive measurements of three months of diverse spam data, broad crawling of naming and hosting infrastructures, and over 100 purchases from spam-advertised sites. We relate these resources to the organisations who administer them and then use this data to characterise the relative prospects for defensive interventions at each link in the spam value chain. In particular, we provide the first strong evidence of payment bottlenecks in the spam value chain; 95% of spam-advertised pharmaceutical, replica and software products are monetized using merchant services from just a handful of banks.
You can read the full paper here [PDF] – Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain
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