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2013-07-13 03:51:59
Tom Chatfield
A recent poll called them one of modern life s top irritants, but how do spam
messages work? And in a world of constantly streaming information online,
should you act like a scammer yourself if you want to win attention?
I woke recently to find a panicked email from an old colleague at the top of my
inbox. He had, it explained, recently been mugged while staying in Manila, and
urgently needed to borrow some money. My immediate thought was to reply, but
then a dose of realism kicked in. I searched online for a selected phrase from
the email and, sure enough, found multiple versions of the text reproduced
among known scams. I left a message on his phone instead, saying his email
account had been hacked and that he should probably let his contacts know he
hadn t been mugged.
The email in question is known as the grandparent scam , because its best
chance of success is among older people unfamiliar with the internet and
potentially willing to dispatch money to grandchildren in peril. As a piece of
creative writing, it begins well I m writing this with tears in my eyes...
but then tails off into something distant enough from plain English to raise
suspicions ( sorry if we are inconveniencing you, but we have only few people
to run to now... this will enable us sort our bills and get our sorry self back
home ).
If it had been written more convincingly, I might have spent the morning trying
to work out if my colleague really was in trouble. Yet, from a spammer s
perspective, fooling me with a better initial email would have made little
sense. I m never going to send money to an alleged acquaintance without
verifying their identity and it would waste a good deal of a scammer s time
trying to construct something that persuades me that they were someone I knew
personally.
In fact, it makes more sense for a scammer to send out messages that most
people will identify as spam, leaving the sender free to devote their efforts
to those who have effectively declared themselves to be naive or gullible. As
Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley argues in his investigation Why do Nigerian
Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?, by sending an email that repels all but
the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and
tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favour.
Spamming is a sophisticated global business and part of this sophistication
means wasting as little time as possible on the majority of internet users. As
a 2012 paper on the economics of spam by research scientists Justin Rao and
David Reiley points out, the global spam industry has revenues of just $200
million per year not insignificant, but a startlingly poor return on 100
billion daily emails. Margins are low, and time-wasting is potentially costly.
Even a few thousand sufficiently wised-up people replying to a classic
Nigerian Prince email might, from the senders point of view, waste enough of
their time to wipe out all hopes of profit from the scheme.
In this respect, spam is depressingly similar to some other online endeavours,
ranging from misleading viral marketing to virtual video-game goods aimed at
minors. Each uses the almost cost-free capacities of digital technology to
target the most suggestible few and to pass on unseen costs in wasted time,
infrastructure and energy to everybody else.
Road to spam-a-lot
It s not just email any more, either. Modern spam covers everything from tweets
and forum posts to fake blogs, articles, phone calls and text messages. Little
wonder that a recent British survey rated spam email and pressure selling as
modern life s top irritants (closely followed by call centres). In each case,
what s going on is a dispiriting mirror image of the ways in which technology
can magnify the power of the individual. Mass accessibility is made an
accessory to mass inconvenience, with a costly sting in the tail for those
easily bewildered.
It s also a realm within which there can be a fine line between persuasion,
publicity and outright untruth, not least because on the screens of our
smartphones, tablets and computers everything is constantly in competition
with everything else. Many of us are desperately seeking a scrap of others
scarce attention. And one of the easiest ways to win this attention is to act
like a scammer yourself: to play the numbers game by spamming the world at
large, and hoping the most promising marks will self-select.
It s easier to copy and fire off a single message twenty times than to write a
couple of original updates. Indeed, this kind of relentless repetition can feel
essential if you want to have a hope of being heard, let alone if you re trying
to drum up interest in a new product or service. Courtesy of social media, spam
approaches from hacked accounts may be an increasingly common approach; but so
too are stand-alone spam accounts designed to look like real people; and real
people and corporate accounts quite willing to engage in spam-like activities
to serve their own ends. Google itself has been in the news for all the wrong
reasons recently, thanks to a proposed $6 million settlement to a class action
lawsuit over 400,000 allegedly spam text-messages sent by its apps subsidiary
Slide.
Attention-seeking is far from the only game online, but it s among the most
ubiquitous and the most seductive. Many online services, in fact, actively
encourage their users to spam each other. More messages and interactions make
them look good, and breed further actions. Quantity, not quality, is the bottom
line.
So why not play the odds, copy your press release or status update to a
thousand people, and then resend repeatedly to help it win through?
The answer, spam suggests, is twofold. What s instant and easy for you is a
cost multiplied across every recipient. But what works for spam is also, by
definition, inadequate so far as any kind of informed decision is confirmed
or any kind of meaningful exchange.
You re likely, in other words, to end up with the kind of attention you
deserve: fleeting, unintentional, and probably rather irritated. This may be
enough. But you should be aware of the company you re keeping.