OSF - 2.01 - scams - scammers vs spammers
Even though they are possibly intertwined, and sometimes very tightly, I suppose that I should start out making a distinction between scammers and spammers.
And, in order to do that, I suppose that the Green Card Lottery Spam is fairly instructive in this regard.
Scammers are out to get you. They want to attack you, and they want to steal things from you. Scammers are confidence men, and fraudsters, and crooks. Their intention is to steal from you. They are bad guys.
Now, a lot of spammers are out to get you anyway. But, and this was the case with the green card lottery spam, a lot of people just think that spam is the same as advertising. It's just advertising that's really, really cheap. At least in the mind of the spammer. Well, the minds of *some* spammers. As I say, scammers and spammers tend to be really tightly intertwined, in a lot of cases.
But, there are people who try to make the case that spam is just a form of advertising. It's just advertising you don't pay for. Now, of course, if the person who is doing the spamming is running a legitimate business, then they have legitimate business expenses, and legitimate income, and they will have a budget for advertising. And they will advertise in regular advertising channels. But, of course, there are always those who are trying to do it on the cheap. But if they're trying to do it on the cheap, then, very likely, the products that they are trying to sell you are also cheap.
Now, the guy who originated the Green Card Lottery Spam, the originator of the whole field of spam, was actually a lawyer. The green card is a certain type of visa or residency permit in the United States. If you have a green card, you are allowed to stay in the United States, and (and this is most important) you are allowed to work and make money while you are doing so. So in those dim and distant carefree days, before anybody cared what ICE was or did, lots of people wanted to come to the United States and get a green card. Green cards were available for certain types of jobs, or people coming from certain countries and jurisdictions, and other people could apply for them. But there was a certain allocation, a certain number of green cards, that would be issued in any given year, and, when various formal applications didn't make up the numbers, then there would be a sort of a windfall allocation of green cards. These allocations were usually issued to immigration offices in different locations around the United States. And, if you had an application in at one of those offices, you won the lottery. You, basically, automatically got issued a green card.
Because of this, people started to think that there was some kind of way that you could game the system. There was some way that you could predict where the green cards would be issued. Which immigration offices would get an allocation of green cards at the end of the year. And, of course, some immigration lawyers, who were less than scrupulous about the actual truth of the situation, would encourage their clients, and particularly potential clients, to believe that they knew how the system worked, and would be able to submit your immigration application to the offices where the lottery allocations would end up. I have never actually heard that anyone did, really, have such inside information. And if they did have such inside information, it was more in the way of corruption, than extensive knowledge. So this myth of the green card lottery was always based pretty much on fraud.
However, lots, and lots, and lots of immigration lawyers did spread the word, and encourage the myth, and solicit clients and customers on the basis that they had an inside track on the green card lottery. So, the guy who did the green card lottery spam was one of these low-level con artists. Whether he was actually outright lying to his clients, or just implying that he knew more about the system than it was possible to know, it was basically a fraud.
In any case, he decided to advertise his services, having some kind of an access to a system that allowed him to send email to people on the internet, such as it was, and he did.
This does all mean that there's a bit of a gray area. Some people think that you need, and sometimes even deserve, to conduct business anyway you can. And, if sending out a lot of messages, at no particular cost or effort to you, is a legitimate way to advertise for people who need, or might possibly want, your products or services. But it's still doing it on the cheap. And, if you really had a decent product, would you really need to use spamming to advertise your product, or service?
So, there is the possibility, that people who are sending you spam are not, necessarily, or inherently, actually crooks. There might be some legitimate products that are out there being advertised in this cheap way, because the person who has made the product, or is providing the service, just simply doesn't have the money. So, let's say, that there is a possibility, however small, that people who are sending spam are not actually fraudsters.
The thing is that spam is now a business. And, those who engage in sending spam, on a large scale, with organized utilities to assist it, well, they are crooks. For a number of years, and actually for a couple of decades, spam was annoying, and increasingly annoying, but it wasn't exactly a business. And then one day somebody realized how they could use malware, and specifically computer viruses, in order to send spam, and, indeed, to set up a business selling spamming services to someone who want to anyone who wanted to send out spam. And, most of the time, that meant that people, both those who were creating the spambotnets, and those who were using them, were all crooks. They were all scammers, and attackers, and fraudsters. So, these days, the possibility that you will encounter somewhat innocent spam, with no criminal intent, is getting pretty small.
But we'll look at that in some more detail when we start talking about how do I identify spam. First of all, let's talk about some specific scams, where people are trying to attack you and steal your money, in a variety of ways.
Online scams, frauds, and other attacks (OSF series postings)
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/02/online-scams-frauds-and-other-attacks.html
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