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Evil Idea: Make money from spammers!

Last week I wrote about the “Spamper” phpbb MOD that used SPAM posts against the spammer. As I mentioned, the idea died because too many people thought that it amounted to a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDOS). No one wanted the legal liability that could result from what I believed was a great idea.

Well, I got to thinking… Maybe Spamper was a bad implementation of a good idea. So, I took the idea one step further. What do you think of this?

Instead of capturing the spammer’s URL and directing traffic to it, suppose you modified your comment script so it directed the spammer to a page that you could make some money from?

You use any of the tricks of the trade to recognize a SPAM post. Then you have a routine that does a redirect to a page that you have the potential to earn some money from.

Maybe you send the spamme’s to your Amazon.com affiliate link and try to sell them a copy of the Harry Potter book. Or maybe you pop up a banner ad that sells one of your product or services.

You could even simply do a redirect to one of your pages that you need traffic to so you can build your Alexa rankings! Wouldn’t it be great if spammers helped you reach a Top 500 rating? Heck, you’d almost want to seek them out and thank them for their troubles.

Think about it. Now, instead of cringing every time a new spammer shows up, you start hearing “Ka-ching!”

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!

So what are your ideas? If you could make a few shekels from every spammer that visited your site, how would you do it? I’ll post the best ideas in a future issue of my blog.

7 Responses to “Evil Idea: Make money from spammers!”

  1. MoneyQs » Blog Archive » Evil Idea: Make money from spammers! Says:

    […] Eloise Pasteur wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptInstead of capturing the spammer’s URL and directing traffic to it, suppose you modified your comment script so it directed the spammer to a page that you could make some money from? You use any of the tricks of the trade to recognize a … […]

  2. Josh Says:

    Heya, this is the FSpamlist.com guy again..

    I LOVE this idea… if you ever want someone to work on it with you, I can help..

    Thanks,
    Josh

  3. olpa Says:

    > I LOVE this idea
    :-) Thanks. I was afraid that I was too spoiled to consider this idea as good or funny. I’m still afraid, but at least I’m not alone.

    > if you ever want someone to work on it with you, I can help..
    Unfortunately, not me. My TODO list is overloaded, and I have to cancel even the useful and interesting ideas.

  4. Josh Says:

    yea, I know how it goes..

    Anyway… I was thinking about this and the advertisers might get mad about “false clicks” if we redirected the spammers to an amazon page or other advertiser links.

  5. Alex McKee Says:

    Yes, this would piss off the advertisers or the affiliate program.
    A bad idea if put into practice, not a bad idea in theory, though.

  6. Spam Bots and CAPTCHAs » Blog Archive » The evil idea again, now with the screenshot and with Harry Potter quiz Says:

    […] evil idea again, now with the screenshot and with Harry Potter quiz The post “Evil Idea: Make money from spammers!” has raised a number of comments. The intermediate verdict is: “A bad idea if put into […]

  7. Rune Jensen Says:

    I have for some time redirected comment-spammeing bots to a search engine with the spammers ip and the word spam in the query stirng.

    Like

    response.redirect “http://google.com?q=spam+” & request.servervariables(”REMOTE_ADDR”)
    response.end

    It is not that the spammer him or herself see this, since the commentspamming is usually done via zoombied PCs (who are in fact innocent of anything else than having lousy security).

    Yet it gives me a feeling of revenge… Since there will in some cases be a GET after the POST, pt. often by another IP - to see, if the message got through. It might end up in some spammers DB giving him some thoughts.

    Also I have been experimenting with redirecting to a page that redirected to another page that redirected… funny to see how long they are willing to go. Actually I only used this for a while. Still have to remember the majority of spammers IPs are innocent users, and it will use their bandwidth…