I just saw a news segment that described about a man named Jeremy Jaynes who was convicted of sending unsolicited e-mails to AOL members and while it is perfectly believable, it was mentioned that he made around $400,000 to $750,000 a month as a small percentage of people actually would respond to the spam and that number is just staggering. Like every other site owner, I deal with thousands of spam each day and it becomes irritating as you try to distinguish them from legitimate messages. Even while running this blog I constantly receive comment spam from what appears to be automatically generated responses about casinos and gambling. In the end, Jeremy Jaynes was sentenced to 9 years in prison and hopefully this will help to discourage some spammers on the Internet to discontinue.
Realistically though, with that kind of money that can be made by spamming, it will probably be a continuing cycle as people will just finds ways to remain anonymous while conducting these types of actions. There’s over a million ways that someone could make a million dollars and I guess it’s one of those different strokes for different folks types of scenarios. In one end you have a side that probably laughs at the other as it’s all about money to them and they mock those who let moral values get in the way of making money and in the other end you have those who condemn others for compromising their integrity and reputation just for money. I personally can’t really say which side is correct as at the end of the day the goal for most businesses is to make money. Would I personally do something like this? No because I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing that I had scammed people to make a dollar. But to those who would say otherwise, I must admit that they sure have developed a strong attitude of being able to separate business from personal decisions which is necessary in running a successful business from the bottom up.
For now, I guess we will have to continue to learn to live with the constant spam that we receive unless something truly substantial happens to restrain the majority from sending unsolicited messages.