S.P.A.M. Experiment Update

Meeting the German participants of the McAfee SPAM Experiment for dinner yesterday turned out to be very interesting and provided some unexpected results. After 14 days living on a Spam-mail diet they are still in good shape. Some are so into it that they even installed SiteAdvisor to find out, in advance, if a site is likely to send you spam when you leave your email address there…

Getting in trouble with the girl-friend for browsing dating web sites while leaving his mail-address for possible use by spammers was one of the less expected (and desired) results.

And then this: Collecting spam through surfing porn sites really does not work! All who tried told me they didn’t receive much spam when leaving their email on such sites. That really was a surprise for me. I would have expected a lot of spam, as there seems to be a fairly obvious link between porn and certain drugs and enhancement pills…

Constantly living in a world full of (empty) promises seems to have some effect as well: “It’s nice sitting here with you, but soon I’ll be hanging out with Tom Cruise and Jessica Alba and I will even get money for it” – it’s amazing what some shady people promise you, just to get your email address and other personal data.

There was some amazement when two participants figured out they had received nearly identical advance-fee scams: One in English, the other one in the Polish language.

Well, I’m sure all participants will have a lot of interesting experiences and stories to share at the end of the experiment and I sincerely hope they manage to stop clicking on all those ‘you are the 100,000,000,000 visitor of this webpage’-banners

Oh, and a last note: If there is one movie you should watch this year, make sure it’s the Futurama: Bender’s Big Score where Spam and Phishing play key elements in the story!!

Tags: phishing, scams, spam