AOL cannot possibly still have enough customers for this to be worth the spammers' trouble, can it?
AOL porn spam. Because it's 1996 in here.
I've gotten three AIM spams in the last couple of weeks, after having not gotten any for like... five years?
Tags: corporations, doomed, firstperson, perversions, spam
13 Responses:
This just happened to me, I actually tweeted about it and called it the "laziest spam" I had ever received. I can imagine someone finding an old "aimspam" project somewhere, updating the affiliate links, and running it on a 5 dollar server. It seriously cracked me up.
Yep, me, a few hours ago, as well as at least one twitter friend. The url always seems to be of the form /?yourAIMusername, and the site is a redirect from trk4 dot com, if anyone cares enough to do more with that.
A friend works at a fairly large company that uses AIM for in-office chat at her location, so the number of AIM users is probably significantly larger than the number of AOL subscribers. FWIW.
Well, AOL customers were old when they signed up in 1996, and the ones who still use it have an even higher percentage of very old people who may or may not get as much human contact as they would like. It's likely that old AOL lists are both easy to come by and very valuable to people who prey on the elderly.
By now, every click on spam is gold, and I bet they jump directly to the classic line "We need your information or you may not be able to get your medication next month."
This exactly is what came to mind... and reminds me of what Freakonomics had to say about why Nigerian 419 spammers send messages that are so obviously bad.
Yeah, ain't it great how XMPP so successfully killed off AIM?
previously.
Apparently I'm a loser who can't be trusted with anything more complicated than plain ASCII text. Sorry about that!
I give it about five years until email postage in Dogecoin paid to the recipient. Crank up the 'unsolicited' value to $0.75 or so and let the machines barter it out.
Aww.... people who still believe in micropayments are so cute.
Yeah, 15 year old me would've been pissed at the thought and 30-something me finds it workable. It helps when it's not exactly real money, though - like your personal ISP could throw in 1000 messages a month or something without a hassle, but then botnets would totally destroy any benefit anyway, oh well. (But the difference in this stroke of idiocy is the user or their ISP keeps it for reciprocity rather than some micropayment authority/corporation skimming their micropayment fees off the top.)
Related to this and actual only reason I'm bothering to reply because yeah WTF: Namecoin is actually sort of a cute idea or at least worth knowing it exists.
I'd imagine AIM is not as well defended as the other services you are thinking of might be.
I get spam in my referer logs, and AIM spam has got to be more than a little bit more lucrative than that.