Rise of the spamateur
         

<p>One of the most trumpeted merits of the Internet is that it has the power to turn anyone into a publisher. The flipside of this is that it also has the power to turn anyone into a spammer. Yet amateur spammers &mdash; 'spamateurs', for want of a better word &mdash; are surprisingly rare. You see the occasional piece of affiliate spam with a homemade look, but the majority of affiliate or syndicated network marketing abuse is well-organized, large-scale activity, involving rented servers at colocation facilities, not one guy sitting at home with a PC. The loose network of providers sending out spam on behalf of "Canadian Health Care" are clearly at least semi-pro. A few persistent spammers seem to be one-man operations - what anti-spammers used to refer to derisively as "chickenboners" - but the real home spammer, the person who sits down at their PC and says <q>"Today I'll make some money from spam"</q> seems to be a rarity.</p>

         

http://www.spamnation.info/blog/archives/2010/11/rise-of-the-spamateur.html