For shooters only

[2650 Plus]

Please, don't even open the weird posts showing up on Target Talk as the posts have nothing to do with our sport. Monitor please remove them as soon as you find the garbage cluttering up the postings. Good Shooting Bill Horton

[GaryD]

I agree, but why do people put these posts on here in the first place.

[Rover]

Because they're sodding assholes.

[justadude]

why do people put these posts on here in the first place.

Unfortunately this is the work of Robo-Software. Yeah, you got it, software that goes trolling the net looking for forums. The underlying structure of these things is pretty standard. Some computer then goes about happily posting "announcements" for all kinds of things we don't want here.

It is an arms race, the more defenses "we" build the more offenses they build.

So it goes.

'Dude

[Freepistol]

I still have to question if they actually make enough sales to make a profit. It seems to me the rate of return on investment would be huge if posting to people who are really interested in their products.

[justadude]

Once they have the program written it costs pennies to let the computer sit there and spam away. If it is being run by a virus and and network of Zombies it does not even cost them to run the computers.

Dude

[Brian M]

Just like telemarketing, junk mail, and spam email ~ there is a lot of profit ripping off the foolish, unaware and gullible.

If there wasn't a profit, then those forms of marketing wouldn't exist. The bigger the profit potential, the less ethical the way of advertising/getting the money.

Thankfully, the posts here are just an eye-sore. They pose no threats to be posted, opened or read. If someone wants to click on the links, then they fall into one of the classes above.

It's all so far above the user level at this point.

[BenEnglishTX]

I still have to question if they actually make enough sales to make a profit.

Yes, they do. Skilled (and even not-so-skilled) spammers who have rented blocks of time on various criminal-controlled botnets can send out, say, a few million Viagra spams for literally a hundred bucks or so. They can then sit back and watch in real time as one out of every 5,000 or 20,000 emails actually produces an order. Whether the order makes $10 or $50, there will still be enough orders to make a tidy profit.

Next, we move on to the post-processing of those orders. Once those 1-in-20,000 idiots actually give their credit card info to the spammers, the spammers then turn around and sell verified-good email addresses to other spammers (or "direct marketers", as the semi-legit ones want to be called). After they've milked that, they may hold the card numbers for a while and hit them with a small charge, hoping it goes unnoticed. Alternatively, they may just bundle up the entire group of card numbers and identification data and sell it on the open market. You do realize there are auction and direct sale sites for data used in ID theft, right? You usually need to be able to read and write Russian to participate but they're fascinating to watch even if you don't know the language.

Spamming drifts up and down in profitability over time but it's generally a mighty profitable business for people with no sense of right and wrong.

[FredB]

There's another aspect that I recently read about. Apparently the Google search software rates "embedded" links more heavily than non-embedded ones. Companies have a powerful incentive to hire someone(s) to post embedded links to their sites on (unrelated) legitimate sites, so that their sites will appear nearer the top on a Google search result page. I would guess that a lot of the recent spamming on TT which includes a link, may be an effort to embed that link on a legitimate website so the Google search software will place it more prominently.

FredB