Permit 1 Mailers Bulk Mail Blog

I am so sick of getting emails that say I can claim millions if I just do this or pay that. So I have started responding to each one I get with the same message:

I will pay you $100 if you will stop sending me these emails.

Thanks!

Then I send it using a non-functional email address after making sure my email address is not contained in the email or any links.

My hope is that the spammers get excited about this new revenue stream and waste time trying to contact me.

You may think the spammers fools who are only wasting time, but last week I saw an email sent to a lawyer's site where the person was reporting that they actually fell for this and sent off $495 so they could collect their millions due to them. While they may or not also be an idiot, NO ONE deserves to be ripped off.

# posted by (hris @ 12:50 PM 0 comments

-----Original Message-----
From: Project Honey Pot Team
Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 9:09 AM
Subject: [Project Honey Pot] 1 Billion Spammers Served

On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT), Project Honey Pot achieved a milestone: receiving its 1 billionth spam message. The billionth message was an United States Internal Revenue Service phishing scam sent to an email address that had been harvested more than two years ago. More than just a single spam email, the billionth message represents the collective work of you and tens of thousands of other web and email administrators like you in more than 170 countries around the world. Together we have built Project Honey Pot into the largest community tracking online fraud and abuse.

To celebrate this milestone, we sifted through five years of data to learn more about spam and the spammers who send it. As a small token of thanks for your help, we wanted to share some of our more interesting preliminary findings. Click the following link for the Full Report:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/1_billionth_spam_message_stats.php

Highlights include:

- Monday is the busiest day of the week for email spam, Saturday is the   quietest

- 12:00 (GMT) is the busiest hour of the day for spam, 23:00 (GMT) is the   quietest

- Malicious bots have increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of   378% since Project Honey Pot started

- Over the last five years, you'd have been 9 times more likely to get a   phishing message for Chase Bank than Bank of America, however Facebook is   rapidly becoming the most phished organization online

- Finland has some of the best computer security in the world, China some   of the worst

- It takes the average spammer 2 and a half weeks from when they first   harvest your email address to when they send you your first spam message,   but that's twice as fast as they were five years ago

- Every time your email address is harvested from a website, you can expect   to receive more than 850 spam messages

- Spammers take holidays too: spam volumes drop nearly 21% on Christmas Day   and 32% on New Year's Day

- And much more.....

We have published it under the Creative Commons Attribution license, so don't hesitate to share anything you find interesting. In the end, we couldn't have gathered this data without you.

Thank you for all your help over the last five years. Here's to wishing you happy holidays and a relatively spam-free New Year.

Sincerely,
The Project Honey Pot Team

==========
This message sent by:
Project Honey Pot (http://www.projecthoneypot.org/)
c/o Unspam Technologies, Inc. (http://www.unspam.com/)
P.O. Box 57265 Murray, Utah
84157-0265  USA

# posted by (hris @ 10:02 AM 0 comments