How spammers make their money According to a US Treasury
advisor, global cybercrime turned over more money than drug
trafficking in 2004. Since then the major global malware
epidemic has been putting greater wealth into the hands of
criminals than ever before, and security experts have warned
that organised crime syndicates have taken over much of the
creation and exploitation of malware in circulation today. But
how do they make their money and how much? Spammers send out
millions of messages on behalf of online merchants who want to
sell a product. If a spam recipient buys something, the spammer
gets a percentage of the sale. For pharmaceuticals the
commission can be as high as 50%, and research has shown that
the response rate can be rather high. A good example is "penis
related spam" which has a 5% click rate, meaning that 5% of the
recipients actually open the spam mail and click on the link in
the mail. This means that spammers can make a massive amount of
money. In July 2007, a retired spammer told PC