Two years spent spamming spammers back
medium.com
medium.com
The phone version of this is Lenny[0], a set of audio files/Asterisk script which pretends to be a senile, doddering old man (who has a duck problem). There's a reddit user who runs a number you can forward your sales calls to, and he'll pick out the best ones and put on YouTube[1]. The record is keeping a caller on the phone for 56 minutes.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduL71_GKzHHk4hLga0nO... (edit: if you sort the user's videos by most popular, the top one is something quite amazing)
Edit: I love his ducks
disclosure: I am one of the author
I laughed out loud at this, because it's exactly what I'm experiencing now in West Africa.
Street vendors are aggressive about selling whatever they have, and they seem to assume I want it - almost like I owe it to them to buy it - I'm not sure if it's because I'm White, or it's just their standard procedure for everyone that walks by.
On my 3 minute walk to the local store, I get a minimum of 10 people in my face, trying to sell me cell phone recharge cards, peanuts and limes. Every single day I say no thanks, every single day they try again, sometimes even on the walk back.
I've tried ignoring them or not responding at all, and that usually makes it worse - they'll yell louder and louder (assuming I have not heard), hiss, make a kissing noise, and eventually put themselves in my way so I'm forced to acknowledge them.
Amazingly, even when I do buy something, and I clearly have it in my hand (a bunch of carrots for example), every single street vendor selling carrots will still try with 100% effort to sell me carrots.
At first we suffered in silence, thinking "well that's just the way they behave in their country", but towards the end we were very direct and to their face when being rude to finally get them to stop.
Only if you operate under the assumption that they share your values. They may be accosting you because they see you as weak, and you may be representing your country or ethnicity poorly in their eyes.
> I wonder what these people think about you
If they're acting at all as GP described, then it's obvious they see you as another mark to aggressively try to extract money from.
Caring about what some bothersome strangers think about you and where you're from takes a distant backseat to standing up to aggression.
I am.
I'm the guy who wrote the story, maybe I did a bad job. It's not like they're getting violent or "trying to extract money from me" - jeez, when you do buy something you can just hold out a handful of money and they'll take the right amount - extremely, extremely honest.
In reality, they're just trying to sell their stuff, I don't understand why someone would react by yelling and getting angry.
Out of curiosity, if they weren't trying to sell you anything, but were behaving like that (hissing/kissing/blocking your path), do you think getting angry would then be an appropriate response?
So does spam. That's why spammers keep sending it.
Does that mean it's OK? Clearly not.
In that case what you're doing seems to be significantly worse than saying "fuck off".
Maliciously wasting their time vs making it clear you aren't interested?
FWIW, I don't think there's anything wrong with what you're doing. I just think it's objectively worse than "yelling and getting angry".
You're describing routine purchases in (perhaps) a market in West Africa, probably with few tourists around. The hawkers aren't making any money from dishonest sales to tourists, and sales are probably reasonably consistent. Repeat customers are common.
The others are describing very popular tourist areas in poorer parts of Europe. All their money comes from tourists, sales rise and fall frequently, there are no repeat customers, and there is strong competition between hawkers for the best places, and possibly efforts to keep newcomers out of the trade.
In one area I used to live in the general "proper" behavior when you are approached by street vendors or beggars was essentially 3 phase.
1) Ignore unless you intend to buy or give. This means you do not reply to anything they say or even make eye contact.
2) Engage verbally or even just visually. This means you intend to buy or give. Now you will be pressured and given an aggressive sell/ask.
3) If it was a mistaken engagement or you don't reach an agreement you MUST aggressively exit. This often means yelling, possibly swearing, and in some cases even putting your hands on someone and even verbally threatening in bad situations.
I spent a significant enough amount of my childhood growing up in this type of culture. My wife was always from a small city. When we later moved I explained to her that this was a big cultural difference than she was used to and the expected way to behave in these situations.
Being from a small city she thought this was disrespectful and continually made things, putting it lightly, more difficult for us.
Eventually it actually put us in a situation that escalated to being dangerous. A seller that she responded to with small talk became very angry that she had wasted his time. He then got in her face, put a hand on her shoulder and started screaming at her.
At that point I ran over, pushed the man off of her and said, "She doesn't fucking want anything. Now get the fuck out of our faces before I have to kick your ass."
After that happened she finally took my advice.
There's been times where I've had hawkers and hasslers continually pester me, where I would ignore them or politely decline while walking away, yet they would begin touching me or continually follow me, leading to attempted pickpocketing, robbery, and sexual assault.
Some will touch you on the shoulder, others will maintain some distance and continually get closer to you only to make a swipe at your pocket then try to run away with your cell phone or wallet (happened to me twice).
One trinket-selling "monk" followed me into a building and grabbed me, but I managed to get back outside.
Another person followed me into three different public bathrooms, which I kept having to exit after he continually followed me and went to the urinal next to me so he could look over at my penis. Eventually he stopped only after I walked by a security guard and yelled about what he was doing.
It is 100% OK to yell at any hustler whom you are walking away from but is still following you. Not doing so was always how the aforementioned scenarios began.
They know your vulnerability is your politeness, your "ambassador" mentality. Don't remain vulnerable when they cross the line and keep following you.
Oddly, I've never had any animosity returned. Just a shrug of "Oh well, I tried".
After a particularly stressful day, one guy decides to take it upon himself to follow me like that for the better part of a city block. Ignoring him wasn't working, so I (honestly quite gently) brushed his hand out of my face, and the guy goes off, threatening to call the police and pulling in bystanders, asking if they just witnessed the terrible assault I've committed.
I guess the moral of the story is, don't work near Times Square.
Instead I'll tell you what we locals do. You'll never be bothered by any vendor again. You do this : walk quickly, purposefully, scarcely making eye contact with your surroundings. Zig zag through crowds like it's destiny.
Perhaps I've made a terrible impression on the tourists I push past, but the signal I give off to vendors is, "I'm not in scope." I even act as a sort of sociopathic enforcer, particularly against those bus tour guys who stand in busy sidewalk areas with their signs.
I have intense familiarity with NYC Paris and London,having lived in all of these places. Being polite or nice or understanding to a random stranger on the sidewalk that wants something from me aggressively is to me a test to see whether I'm a sucker. Whether I'm vulnerable.
Save your politeness for people who aren't hustlers.
In Mexico, it's Hoy no (Not today) and it works pretty well.
Yes first couple of hours, maybe days, you will be polite and expect these values returned. But they wont be. Anything less than aggressive behavior is taken as sales potential. Quickly you will realise should you want to be able to walk down the street you must get rude fast to anyone that crosses the line. Some previous advice in this thread is good, avoid eye contact. If they respect that they can call out etc. As soon as they physically get in your space you need to let them know this is not acceptable. Polite simply doesn't work. Its not being self entitled. Its the cultural necessity of some countries.
Maybe there are worse environments that I have never experienced and where outright rudeness is the only answer, but as described I have experienced it and never had to resort to anything more than:
- keep moving at a firm pace
- avoid eye contact
- hold a hand up, palm outward, preemptively, as you move (I'm not a tourist, I work here)
- as a last resort, speak loudly and sternly in a local language without addressing anyone directly, "No, thank you," or "No!"
It's still rude, but I feel a far cry from defaulting to yelling obscenities and getting agitated.
As I said, maybe there are environments where that doesn't work, or maybe it just works for me. But defaulting to rudeness without even attempting to figure out the appropriate measure of sternness in a place where you are, for most intents and purposes, a guest, is poor form.
Yes, it is annoying, but nevertheless, you are in their country, and they are trying to make an honest (not counting the overpricing of their goods) living. If someone can't handle that, maybe they shouldn't have gone there.
>- hold a hand up, palm outward, preemptively, as you move (I'm not a tourist, I work here)
What, push people out of the way?
And now that you've touched someone, they'll touch back...
You're making a cultural assumption that the locals aren't rude to the hawkers. This is incorrect. The hawkers in fact are taking advantage of your unusual, culturally incorrect assumption that street hawkers shouldn't be treated aggressively, which is why tourists are their prefered market. How do you know the locals aren't quite rude or abrupt with the hawkers as well?
The upside of this is that people don't shy away from Westerners the way they do in Tokyo, which makes for a smootger experience if you enjoy talking to natives.
It's like giving in to a nagging child - they now know that you're an easy mark and will be even more determined to break you because they now know they can. You bought carrots from someone else, probably to stop them hassling you, so now if I want to sell t you I know if I'm annoying enough the chances are high you'll buy from me too.
Well, it turned out to be a bad idea. A few hundred meters from the tower, I was greeted by someone who self-identified as a "friend from Jamaica". He tried to advertise something, but walked away after I asked him politely. As I continued my journey, I met more and more of these "friends". When I eventually reached the tower, I discovered that about 10 of these guys were circling around it. They were all very polite, but they advertised their stuff every time they stumbled upon me, which happened about once per minute. After some time, I decided to find a different place to rest.
I assume their mass mailing program would just start at the top of an email list and send them one by one, without tracking progress, so when the computer crashed they would have to start over. After a few crashes in a row hopefully the spammer would blame the spam sending program for crashing the computer and give up, maybe even demand a refund from whoever sold it to them.
Amusing aside: I once hired one of these Indian web dev outsourcing firms to create a super simple form for one of our sites. (Not from a spam email, which I certainly wouldn't want to reward, but probably a similar outfit.) We could have done it in house, but I wanted to see how viable it would be to farm out simple, nicely encapsulated work when it came up.
Their failures were many and varied, but the most hilarious was when one of them wanted to givea section of form an orange border. (For some reason. The site's colour scheme was mostly greens with no orange to be seen.) Anyway, he decided the best way to do this was to find an enormous png of a sunset (multiple megabytes), and repeat a small strip of the top 10px or so as a background image in a div behind the area. I'm still not sure whether I was being trolled, or if incompetence on that scale is actually possible. (Normally I would assume it must be the former, but given their myriad other screw-ups, I'm not entirely sure.)
Every time I would write to complain about something utterly idiotic they'd done, they would wholeheartedly agree, share in my amazement at how foolish it was, and assure me that that junior programmer had been removed, and someone more senior would be taking over the project. (I went through a couple of levels of seniority, then eventually gave up when the Senior Lead Architect or whoever delivered the orange border monstrosity.)
Anyway, the most competent person in that company was definitely the one sending the emails.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-07-19/news/os-litte...
I'd love to see it have random answers that are unique based on the question. Then you make it a global service that hundreds of thousands of people can forward messages to, and then you waste spammers time en masse.
Great tool.
https://www.ted.com/talks/james_veitch_this_is_what_happens_...
I'm sure that GitHub community will help to make it even better
def random_reply
reply = Reply.order("RAND()").first.content
# if the conversation is getting long, start injecting hipster sentences to the end...
if self.conversation.emails.count > 10
reply << " #{Faker::Hipster.sentence}"
end
return reply
end
There used to be a trick in the UK of attaching reply envelopes to bricks and putting them back into the postal system, hoping that the spammer would be charged by weight, but Royal Mail put an end to that.
Turned out they pulled my phone number from the WHOIS info on my domain which I can only assume they sold to some marketing companies as I received about a dozen cold calls from various "web agencies" from the states. A lot of them were relentless, calling me repeatedly and leaving voicemails.
But I disagree with the idea that inboxes are sacred, and disagree with the attitude of "how dare people send marketing to me!" Fraudulent spam is one thing. Plain old marketing or sales cold calls, though... you know people are going to do it. It is their job. And I'd much rather get emails than I can quickly delete and ignore vs. phone calls. And once in a while, someone actually hits on a service that is useful to me.
So I don't think the real-life scenario of people badgering you outside the door is accurate. The better metaphor would be one comparing your inbox to your actual mailbox. Sure, junk mail is annoying and most of it gets thrown out. But sometimes that restaurant down the street does send coupons.
Sales cold calls are illegal in my country and happen to me once every few years. My email address isn't so lucky.
>Sure, junk mail is annoying and most of it gets thrown out.
And more importantly: I can put a simple "no advertisements" sign on my real mailbox and cut down junk to almost zero. I wish I could do that to my virtual inbox.
Email junk is far worse than any real-live equivalent in my culture.
A better metaphor is having my business and private conversations while walking over a Middle-Eastern market where random people try to sell me stuff.
Fun fact: this isn't possible in the US. I'd never considered how that might influence how Americans think about spam email in general.
If someone feels entitled to someone else's time, I don't see any problem in turning the situation around. If there wasn't a good enough ROI on cold-call marketing, it would be rarer, and that sounds like a net benefit to me.
And as to this: "You know people are going to do it. It is their job." This always puzzles me. So what?
Telemarketers are just doing their job. Door-to-door salesmen are just doing their job. Pickpockets and hit men are just doing their job. That people have found a way to make a living from being an asshole does not mean I have to support them in any way.
In the end, the purpose of most advertising and sales activity is to manipulate people into buying something regardless of the purchaser's utility or need. This is a fundamentally disrespectful activity; the people they attempt to manipulate owe them no respect in return.
And we did, by implementing Bayesian spam filters, not be making spam illegal. It's a bit rich to think we can legislate a global Internet.
> Telemarketers are just doing their job. Door-to-door salesmen are just doing their job. Pickpockets and hit men are just doing their job.
These are differences of kind, not degree.
> That people have found a way to make a living from being an asshole does not mean I have to support them in any way.
Feel free to spend your money how you please, but do we really have to write it into the law?
Why is junk mail legal but spam is not? It's because Congress could understand the mechanics of junk mail, not because junk mail has any sort of moral or societal value lacking in spam.
> In the end, the purpose of most advertising and sales activity is to manipulate people into buying something regardless of the purchaser's utility or need. This is a fundamentally disrespectful activity; the people they attempt to manipulate owe them no respect in return.
This is a pretty cynical view of marketing. Do you work somewhere with a marketing department? Is that what they do?
Yeah, if something is hard we should just give up right away and save time.
> These are differences of kind, not degree.
All of them have in common that they make their living in ways that are mostly negative-sum interactions, ones that they make profitable. All of them are also partly or totally illegal in many jurisdictions because society recognizes that negative-sum issue.
> Why is junk mail legal but spam is not?
Junk mail has a much higher ratio of production/delivery cost to recipient cost. It's societally much less of a problem.
> This is a pretty cynical view of marketing.
I said "most sales and advertising" for a reason. There are other ways to market things. And it's not impossible to do advertising or sales usefully. It's just not the bulk of what goes on.
But if you'd like to check, see what gets salespeople paid. Is it when the value is delivered or when the sale is made? You could also see how much ad agencies do to test the value of products before they hype them. Or whether they go back and make sure that they aren't giving purchasers the wrong expectations.
You misunderstood me, and it is true that I did not speak plainly. The Internet is a global resource which we cannot legislate because it isn't something we have authority over. A counterargument might go, "so is the radio spectrum, and we regulate that," and that is so, but I don't think you'd like an Internet where it's illegal to send someone an email if there country hasn't signed a treaty with your country (as it can be, simplistically, with ham radio).
> All of them have in common that they make their living in ways that are mostly negative-sum interactions, ones that they make profitable.
Pickpockets and hitmen are a drain on society in every conceivable way, but to say you're being unfair to telemarketers is a bit of an understatement. When they call trying to get me to fill up empty spaces on cruises so they don't feel like ghost ships, they are offering me something that (if you squint and pinch your nose) has value, and Carnival certainly sees value in what they're doing. Who is getting fleeced here?
Are they in a line of work that I wouldn't be comfortable with? Yes they are, but that doesn't make them the same as thieves and murderers. I can understand not being interested in entertaining moral relativism, but a nuisance is just not the same thing as a threat, and treating them as similar leads to poor decisions.
> Junk mail has a much higher ratio of production/delivery cost to recipient cost. It's societally much less of a problem.
Which of these is an existential threat, receiving unsolicited sales pitches, or running out of fossil fuels?
> I said "most sales and advertising" for a reason.
I said you were being very general, presumably I had a reason too.
> ...see what gets salespeople paid. Is it when the value is delivered or when the sale is made?
Don't salespeople deliver value to their employer when they make a sale? Isn't it their job to make sales and engineer's (or whatever specialty's) job to create whatever valuable thing will be delivered to the customer? Do you get paid for things you don't do?
> You could also see how much ad agencies do to test the value of products before they hype them.
Is it the ad agency's job to make sure my Anker cable won't overvolt my battery? Or is that the role of Anker and relevant regulators?
> Or whether they go back and make sure that they aren't giving purchasers the wrong expectations.
We can agree this is definitely their responsibility, and to forgo it would be dishonest.
It would be a big step forward in spam fighting.
But one of the first things I would have coded is preventing the same message to be sent again.
The examples are full of that.
In fact why not take the inbound spams, and save those... and sprinkle them in to the outbound replies?
Do you have localized versions? [I'm from Argentina and Most of my spam is in Spanish. I guess no. :( ]
If it detects a spam related to search engine optimization, it should have a list of about a hundred plausible questions it can ask on that subject, for example. There aren't that many spammed subjects.
Most email spam, though, is promoting a link, and can't handle an email reply. You'd need something smart enough to go to a web site and sign up with fake credentials.
PS: Nice project btw
- The 7 legged spider story.
- The guy that tricked Nigerian spammers into acting the dead parrot sketch from Monty Python
Spider: http://27bslash6.com/overdue.html Monty: http://www.419eater.com/html/bigman.htm
Please share this on github. we will be able to add our sugestions to the list of answers!