An elementary question about spam

[Jens]

I suspected that the answer to this may be complex, but I'll ask anyway.

Often, spam comes which is trying to direct the recipient to some real business. Do the stores that will benefit from this have a relationship with the spammer? For example, spam messages for online pharmacies. Is it OK to get angry at the actual store, or is the spammer doing this independently? I mean, I can't help but think that there must be some business practice (commissions or what not) that make it profitable for spammers.

[tdvance]

Not too many spammers would go through the trouble to promote a store without some compensation for doing so. Now, the store might not be directly involved, but still is involved. By that, I mean, store hires marketing firm, tells them "increase my profits". Marking firm does this by hiring spamming firm (if Dilbert is right, the marketing firms are dumb enough to do that! I bet marketing professionals just love Dilbert....). Still, the store should know what their contractors and subcontractors are doing.....(that's another Dilbert cartoon--the pointy-haired-boss's company hires a contractor, that hires a contractor, that hires ... that finally hires a contractor that hires the original company, so they're making the product for themselves and paying all the subcontractors overhead for the privilege to do so).

In the case of online pharmacies--well, there are the legit ones, i.e. real pharmacies that let you order drugs online and confirm your prescription, etc. Then, there are the shady ones catering to people trying to get around the prescription system for various reasons, and of course, some of the drugs one gets from those are fake anyway. I tend to think most of the spam would be from the latter. (so, if you want to buy from an online pharmacy, pick one like CVS or Rite-Aid that is known and established as a brick-and-mortar pharmacy as well, not one you learned about in SPAM!).

[ngc3314]

I suspected that the answer to this may be complex, but I'll ask anyway.

Often, spam comes which is trying to direct the recipient to some real business. Do the stores that will benefit from this have a relationship with the spammer? For example, spam messages for online pharmacies. Is it OK to get angry at the actual store, or is the spammer doing this independently? I mean, I can't help but think that there must be some business practice (commissions or what not) that make it profitable for spammers.

Our family came across an interesting (and apparently quite legal) variation on this. Many well-known online retailers have a relationship with a group of businesses known as Web Loyalty this-or-that. After doing a normal online transaction, before going to the next site you get a popup window offering a discount coupon or something, and asking you to read a bunch of fine print aned enter your email address. You get the discount coupon all right - and if you watch your statements, will discover that you are enrolled in some kind of membership that will debit your credit card every month until you cancel. What makes my skin crawl is that this business arrangement allows the company you intended to do business to forward WL your credit-card information without your explicitly being made aware of this fact.

Note that since the popup appears after you head to another URL, this could be clicked on by one of the ids in the home, or almost anyone. I owuldn't mind seeing legislative action on this matter of forwarding your credit card data without your explicit knowledge - yeah, it's in the fine print, but there are so many similar-appearing and legitimate online coupon offers that don't exert such a cost that this surely qualifies as exceptionally sharp business practice, relying on the familiarity of consumers with such things and the habit of clicking on long tedious end-user agreements just to get on with things.