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Con artists

Наследники О. Бендера

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Spammers recruit spammers

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Thursday, April 20, 2017

At first glance it may appear that temporarily unemployed people, who aren’t highly skilled workers or can’t find full-time employment situations, have abundant opportunities to make money over the Internet.

Any novice entrepreneur knows how difficult it is to build a client base and how much time and effort it takes to draw attention to their business. Nowadays sending out mass mailings can generate a reasonable income. Then why not go for it? After all, it doesn't require any specific qualifications or skills.

It sounds logical and even quite decent. A business needs new customers and to draw them in, they need to notify people about the availability of new goods or services. So what's the catch? Well, there are several of them.

Usually useful information is sent out about one specific topic. The main rule is that people must subscribe to emails so that they aren’t regarded as spam. It’s not easy, but once you have over 1,000 subscribers, you can start generating a profit.

Payment: around $5.00 for ads in a mailing to 10,000 subscribers + interest generated under an affiliate programme.

It's not that bad if one is unemployed, and if it supplements your main source of income, it sounds really good. The problem is that in order to accomplish this, one has to:

  • Create a list of recipients who are willing to receive the emails (otherwise it will indeed be spam).
  • Send information only to those who are really interested in it—otherwise the emails also become unsolicited.

But! If you already have a 10,000-strong mailing list, why would you need to work for peanuts? Now you are just one step short of setting up a proper business and offering services via your own site.

What are you offered instead?

Register at [the title has been removed by the project's administration]. This site will be used to advertise your mailing list and generate profits. There are also other services, but one is more convenient and gives you a free start. Only when you exceed the limit of 50 thousand emails will you be asked to pay.

Why is a paid mailing service better for business? In their uncompromising fight with unsolicited emails, mail servers use anti-spam filters. If you use a free public email service to dispatch your mass mailing, the filters will at best move those messages into a spam folder (to avoid infection those normally shouldn't be opened) or at worst won't allow them into mailboxes at all and the subscribers will never know about your mailing. That's why you need a paid service whose owners have entered into an agreement with the mail servers' administration.

I won't give you any advice about how to choose a mailing service. I'd rather tell you about my experience.

So I thought to myself: Why reinvent the wheel? In short, I googled a bit and found out which service my colleagues use. I then concluded that the service [the title has been removed] was the absolute best.

Or perhaps it’s a scam? Let's check it out!

#drweb

And there are other sites of this kind.

So I started looking for reviews about [the title has been removed] and found nothing suspicious. I went ahead and paid the fee for three months, and the next day I received my login and password. So I gave a sigh of relief: it was not scam after all! Well, actually, it was. I sent the email address and my card number for receiving payments to my new employer. And they replied that everything was OK but that I would only get work after 10 days because of some problems. And, at that moment, it dawned on me that I’d been scammed! I sent off my objection stating that I wouldn’t have lost my money on the mail service had I been warned in advance about the 10-day delay, but I received no reply and apparently never will… I verified the address and it turned out that there was no registered company associated with it. ...

I hope this will serve as a warning to other people. And I don't like the idea that these scammers will continue conducting their shady business. So I’m out my money and I’m ticked off, but I can't go after them legally because I paid for the mail service and they provided it.

http://inetpolice.ru/forum/threads/rabota-vneshtatnogo-sotrudnika-po-rassylke-pisem.584

But, let’s suppose you decided not to pay for a service but to first accumulate a subscriber base.

  • Make profit. For starters, you can insert texts containing useful information into emails and offer subscribers the opportunity to purchase goods under your affiliate programme. When you accrue over 1,000 subscribers, you can offer your services to advertisers at a moderate price.
  • Keep subscribers interested. Do not assume that once a user has subscribed to your mailing list and read several emails about a certain topic that they will also start reading the ads and using the links in your messages to purchase goods. That’s not the case at all! You need to add new information into your messages regularly—rather than staying silent for a prolonged period of time, provide your readers with news, reviews or notes and some images.

Assess the actual amount of work ahead of you. Essentially you are being asked to maintain a blog that will be of interest to several groups of readers. But if you are talented enough to have a blog of this kind, why participate in the scheme? Blogs often feature advertisements, but if the information is interesting, there’s nothing wrong about it.

Gain as many subscribers as possible.

To accomplish this, one usually has to do the following:

1. As soon as your site goes online, instantly create a subscription form. By doing this you will make sure that everyone who wishes to subscribe to your mailing list will be able to do so from the very start. <...>

3. Offer freebies (gifts) Everybody likes gifts even if they aren't particularly useful. Many Internet businesses take advantage of this to gain new subscribers. You may offer free training (useful information free of charge) or write a novel and make it available only to subscribers. Launch a promo where every one hundredth subscriber will receive a popular book, CD or even get a holiday trip at a discount.

But, if you can create a site on your own (maintaining a site always requires money) and promote it so well that it will draw visitors, once again why would you involve yourself with an employer of this kind?

By the way!

Just a note—this article has nothing to do with spam.

(Use sarcastic intonation when you read this paragraph ☺) Sure, we believe you. Sending messages on behalf of a company that is too lazy to do it on its own but can afford to pay an army of mailers. Indeed, it has nothing to do with spam! And once your ISP learns what you’re doing, it will be completely understanding and won't disconnect you. Right…

#spam #fraud #dubious_sites

The Anti-virus Times recommends

Because scammers never cease to invent new tricks, those who aren't aware of the online fraud phenomenon can fall for them. The best way to avoid these traps is to stay away from sites of this kind. Use the HTTP monitor SpIDer Gate and Dr.Web Cloud for Windows and you'll never encounter them.

Dr.Web doesn’t just warn users against visiting sites that use social engineering techniques to take advantage of their visitors. Moreover, our lawyers battle the owners of these sites in courts of law—and win!

[Twitter]

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