Viagra Spam Makes 120 Grands pm For Affiliate Networks - Sophos

A recent document from SophosLabs - by Dmitry Samosseiko - THE PARTNERKA – WHAT IS IT, AND WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? speaks about how the Russian-Canadian brotherhood is interrupting our web surfing experience and running A ZILLION $$$$$$ SPAM industry. 'Organized' Spam Affiliate Networks termed - "Partnerka" are the mastermind behind these spam drives.

Dmitry managed to get his hands on backend of Glavmed - one of the largest Pharmacy Affiliate Networks Online. Glavmed's backend is a PHP E-commerce setup which is built to benefit the spammers who participate in promoting the pharmacies. GlavMed calls for its affiliates to create several independent affiliate webproperties and promote them online by spamming.

Online Pharmacy Affiliate Programs are one of the MOST OPTED form of affiliate programs due to huge amount of cash that they generate for affiliates and increasing demand of 'generic' drug sell online. Quite surprisingly though GlavMed claims that it is strongly antispam. Dmitry mentions that GlavMed also has a sister firm "SpamIt" which has an army of researchers who are experts at generating email lists and are the masterminds behind the common 'scareware threat'. 

These 'Partnerka' apart from carrying out spamming also carry out other methods of generating traffic to there websites within a shortest period of time. The traffic generation techniques of Partnerka include following:-
1. BlackHat SEO
2. DNS Changer Trojans
3. Doorway Pages
4. Seldom - A PPA campaign on adult websites

Dmitry was also able to get a peek at Glavmed's sales copies and he was amazed after discovering that they made more than 20 sales per day from EACH SPAM CAMPAIGN. Glavmed claims 40% on each sales made by its affiliates. Now imagine the number of sales and revenue generated from each Spam Drive Sent every day?? Not to forget this gets further multiplied by the number of online Pharmacy Affiliates (Partnerkas) exist. 

A webmaster having traffic ranging 10K/month can easily make $180K per annum with the corresponding comissions being paid every 11 days, says Dmitry in his journal. 

January 2009, Messaging Anti Abuse Working Group claimed that 55% users end up clicking on spam messages with 15% of them being the niche which is actually interested in them. Though it is a very minute percentage off the total audience which computes, but still it accounts for the Return On Investment which these Organized Underground Spammers earn. 

Earlier, I also blogged about a similar concept, where Spammers are able to support attacks on Twitter, Facebook etc by buying out million $ supercomputers which house spambots. 

While this is just a tip of the iceberg, with more people getting attracted towards affiliate programs because of its self employed nature and ease of working from home. Affiliate marketing brings along with a need to have a default regulatory body to fight this act of disrupting web surfing to earn a quick buck.