Suppose you’re selling a penis enlargement drug. If you sell your product for, say, $50, and send out 100 million spam message (which only costs the spammer the price of a monthly ISP fee once the initial expensea of setting up a mass-mailer and buying a list of email addresses are covered), even a pathetic customer reply rate of one in a million would see you make 100 sales and earn a gross revenue of $50,000. Not bad, eh?

And your product is, of course, nothing more than a placebo, so you’ve spent nothing on R&D, and the pills only cost you a few cents per unit to manufacture and barely anything to ship (and you can always pass on the shipping and handling cost to the customer anyway, even charging more for S&H than your actual expense, netting you an even greater profit). What’s your dissatified customer going to do, complain to the FDA or the BBB that the penis enlargement drug he bought from a shady spam message doesn’t actually enlarge his penis?

If spamming wasn’t profitable, the spammers would all have been driven out of business years ago. Unfortunately for us, sending spam is an extremely lucrative business.

“How much money is spent controlling spam?”

Enough that there ought to be harshly enforced international laws against it. Of course, most spammers use off-shore operations beyond the arm of the law anyway, so there’s really little that can be done to stop it. I also read a scary statistic (the exact number might be wrong, but it’s not off by too much) that something like 50% of all internet traffic is spam messages. Imagine how much more efficient the internet would work and how much less infrastructure would be needed if the spam problem was eliminated.