30% of Internet Users Admit to Buying from Spam

According to a small, recent study performed by Marshal, up to 30% of internet users admit to buying items like sexual enhancement pills, adult entertainment, software, luxury items, and clothing from spam that they have received.  These kinds of studies come up every few months or so and the percentages of email users who admit to buying from spam vary wildly (see this Techdirt article which briefly mentions a couple of them).  Many of these studies have small sample sizes and little information is given as to the some of the other demographics of the participants in the survey (which I think would also be VERY interesting).  No matter whether you believe the real number is closer to 4% or 30%, the underlying moral of the story is that a significant number of people are purchasing products from spammers.  The answer to the spam-old question of "Who would actually get tricked into buying \/1agra?" is "A lot of people!"  Spammers wouldn't continue to spam if it wasn't a profitable venture.

The 30% figure seems a bit high to me in today's internet, especially with the prevalence of spam filters which keep almost all of the junk mail out of user's inboxes.  This does lend credence to the theory though that improved social engineering and targeting of spam emails does have a significant effect on the ROI for the spammer.  Even though far less spam is arriving in the inbox, a significant percentage of people are still buying it. 

I like to play with numbers and derived (what I thought are) a few interesting stats.

Let's do some math (everyone's favorite subject):

Number of spam messages per day on the internet: 150B (industry estimate)
Cost to send a spam message $0.000001 (estimate)
Amount in losses from phishing in 2008: $4B (estimated by Gartner)

So, if you assume 150B spam messages per day at $0.000001 per spam message.  That works out to spam costing spammers approximately $150,000 per day to send. 
If you divide the $4B in losses from phishing ALONE by 365 (the number of days in a year) you get almost $11M per day in losses!  This doesn't even include profits from the things the things that we mentioned at the start of this post such as porn and enhancement pills or even stolen credit cards and compromised bank and brokerage accounts.  Cha-Ching!

To be fair, this isn't an apples to apples comparison because we are considering the cost to send ALL spam every day compared with the losses incurred just from phishing, but even just to compare these numbers is staggering!  Just using the $11M and $150,000 numbers spammers make over 73x what they spend, just in phishing returns. 

How many businesses do you know that would like a 730% daily profit margin?  Raise your hand if yours would :)

So, as we've said before: Spam is easy.  Spam works.  Spam makes huge profits for the criminals behind it all.  The numbers are hard to deny.  Look for more spam headed toward the inbox, mobile device, or blog nearest you!