As a follow up to my previous post “Is There Anything Redeemable About Spam?” I want to share a news story I ran across today in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The article describes two brothers, college students, who are being indicted for a massive spam operation.  Apparently, they designed software to gather student e-mail addresses from “more than 2,000” colleges across the United States.  Here’s an excerpt:

The spammers developed e-mail extracting programs that harvested more than eight million student e-mail addresses, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri. They allegedly sold more than $4.1-million in products in at least 31 spam e-mail marketing campaigns, inflicting damage on the University of Missouri network in the process.

So, with some technical know how, but at very little cost to themselves, two college students allegedly earned themselves “more than $4.1-million”  4.1 million!  Again we see why spam exists – because it’s a form of marketing and sales that works, and very well at that.  It works because people buy the products and make it work.  So don’t think that spam is going away anytime soon.  With examples like this, I’d expect that some of the spammers are going to become more and more sophisticated as time goes on.

For the full article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, click here.

Steve Elmore
Director of Communications
C.S. Lewis Foundation