$2M profits for spam campaign despite low conversion, says study

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, conducted a simulated fake pharmacy spam campaign that suggests operators of a similar system could generate annual profit of several million US dollars despite a low conversion rate.

The UCSD team led by Stefan Savage sent out e-mails advertising a fake herbal remedy to boost libido on a dummy drug store site similar to one used by real spammers, but inactivated so that an error message appeared each time users tried to submit credit card details.

After 26 days, almost 350 million junk e-mails had been sent out, resulting in only 28 sales, equivalent to a response rate of under 0.00001%. The average value of each purchase was about $100, which would have totaled earnings of roughly $2,731 over the course of the month-long study, about $100 a day. However, the researchers noted that they used only 1.5% of the actual spammers' network, which in its entirety would generate closer to $7,000 a day, or over $2.0 million a year.