If you crunch the numbers in the AOL stolen e-mail case, those 30 million e-mail addresses sold for $100,000, or about $0.003 (one-third of a cent) per address. Makes you feel cheap, doesn’t it? But this was a bulk deal, and it sounds like the seller didn’t have any other buyers, so the buyer probably got an especially good deal. I have a hunch that e-mail addresses typically sell for between $0.02 and $0.10 each, in some healthy quantities, of course. This is just a guess. Honest.
This should tell you that spammers are figuring that a pretty low percentage of spam messages result in real business, probably less than 1 percent. But when they’re sending out hundreds of thousands of messages, that could still mean that one batch of spam could result in hundreds of transactions. It’s all a numbers game. Big numbers.
If you’re a spammer, having lots of e-mail addresses is nice, but you also need a way to distribute your message. You need bots.
