Are spammers necessarily scammers
Looking through my e-mail inbox and I am genuinely surprised at how much spam I receive. As far as I know I have not given my e-mail address to the number of people who are e-mailing me with offers of enlargement. I have also not given my e-mail address to any lottery websites where I have the chance of winning $17.5 million where before collecting I must send them $200.
This is all spam as it is an unsolicited e-mail and in almost every case it is also a scam. The senders are hoping that I will be stupid enough to give away some valuable information to them so they can steal my money, identity, or both.
However, looking at the web today and mainly Google you can see that there is definitely a difference between the two things. Spamming does not necessarily equal scamming.
To get to the top of Google a lot of sites try and game the system. They use automatic scripts to post to millions of sites, commenting on blogs and forums to get a valuable backlink. These backlinks are viewed by Google as a vote to their site. The more votes your site receives the higher it will appear in the rankings.
So a lot of the people who are trying to get high on Google are spamming but they still may be promoting a legitimate website and so they aren’t actually scamming.
Of course, some the people who are spamming to get high in Google may use botnets, networks of hijacked computers working together to do what the hijackers wants. This is of course scamming…
So the question is, do you differentiate between people spamming legitimate websites and those spamming to scam people. Both are fucking annoying but lets be honest, a lot of people are after a quick buck.
Spammer – (noun) A person who sends unwanted or inappropriate electronic mail to multiple recipients, often advertisements. (Taken from Dictionary.com)
Scammer – A confidence game or other fraudulent scheme, esp. for making a quick profit; swindle. (Also taken from Dictionary.com)
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