Computer scientists at the University of California–Berkeley and UC–San Diego hijacked a working spam network to see how the business operated. They found that the spammers, who were selling fake “herbal aphrodisiacs,” made only one sale for every 12.5 million e-mails they sent: a response rate of 0.00001 percent. Each sale was worth an average of less than $100. It doesn’t look like much of a business. But sending out the e-mails was so cheap and easy—it was done using a network of hijacked PCs, which the fraudsters used free of charge—that the spammers made a healthy profit. Pumping out
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