Spam Queen: 'Just Trying to Make a Living'
Laura Betterly defends her career as a stay-at-home
spammer.
By Dave Roos
What exactly does a spammer look like? It's easy to imagine a nameless,
concrete-enclosed corporation spitting out anonymous bulk Viagra ads
from a smoke-filled, Satanic server farm. Spam is evil (everyone can
agree on that, right?), so its senders must be soulless parasites,
scamming and sapping the life out of innocent emailers.
Then how do you explain Laura
Betterly? Betterly is a 41-year-old
stay-at-home single mom who claims that her small-time spam operation --
Data Resource Consulting
-- is the best way for her to make a living while spending quality time
with her two boys, 10-year-old Chris and 11-year-old Craig.
Betterly will appear on Tuesday's episode of "The Screen
Savers" to defend her career as a stay-at-home spammer. Listen to
her story and post your responses in the
Talkback section below.
Two sides to every spammer
In this Wall
Street Journal article, Betterly insists that she's "just
trying to make a living like everyone else." Call her a "spam
queen," she doesn't care. "As long as I'm not breaking any
laws," Betterly says, "you don't have to love me or like what
I do for a living."
Before you dismiss Betterly as a high tech lowlife, take a look at
this spammer pro/con list we whipped up from facts culled from
Betterly's Wall Street Journal profile.
Spammer pros
- By staying at home, Betterly can responsibly raise her children
and save money on child care.
- Betterly and three friends started Data Resource Consulting with a
$15,000 investment. Her projected income for this year is $200,000.
- Bulk email pays well for an extremely small return rate. If
Betterly receives responses from 0.001 percent of her mailing list,
she can still break even.
- Betterly isn't breaking the law. Her home state of Florida doesn't
have strict anti-spam statutes, unlike 26 other states.
- She doesn't send porn
spam, because she believes it "degrades
society."
- She sends messages only to people who have expressed an interest
in the products or services through other websites.
Spammer cons
- Betterly's company, Data Resource Consulting, sends as many as 60
million spam email messages a month.
- Anti-spam service Brightmail
estimates that 36 percent of all email in August 2002 was spam, as
opposed to only 8 percent in August 2001.
- Betterly insists she only sends messages to people who have
expressed an interest in her products, but some (if not most) of her
recipients likely signed up inadvertently. When registering for a
website, some sites ask you to check boxes indicating your
interests. In the fine print there's often a second box that asks
you if you want to receive offers for related products. Many sites
require you to "opt out" of these email messages by
unchecking the box. Many people overlook this and fall victim to
spam.
- Betterly sells whatever information she receives from her bulk
email messages to another, larger spammer called wfsDirect. The spam
chain continues.
What's your verdict?
Is Betterly making an honest buck? Should small-time spam operations
be shut down? Is Betterly's spam career any worse than billboard, TV,
radio, and Internet advertising? Would you consider becoming a
stay-at-home spammer? Let me know through my contact
page.
Originally posted November 18, 2002
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