Spam is so much fun! But sometimes it’s baffling.

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On Sep 20, 2021, at 1:21 PM, ** wrote:

Dear Dr. Andrew Gelman,

I am **, an Editorial assistant from a UK based publishing company contacting you with the reference from our editorial department. Basing on your outstanding contribution to the scientific community, we would like to write a book for you.

Researchers like you are adding so much value to the scientific community, yet you are not getting enough exposure. No matter how many papers you publish in famous journals, you will be still unknown to common people. To solve this problem, we came up with this unique solution.

With our book writing service, we will write your research contributions in common man’s language. We will also include all your published papers into this book in a way that a common man can understand it. And then, we will publish your book with our publishing group. Before, publication, we will send the draft to you for scientific accuracy, once you approve our draft, we then proceed for publication. You will get all the rights of your book, and all the sales generated from your book will be credited to you.

Your book will then be listed on famous websites like Amazon, eBay, Good Reads, and many other popular book websites. As a result, you will get good credit and people will recognize your hard work and your scientific contributions.

Last but not least, after the publication of your book, it will be published in Google News, Yahoo, and other major news channels. What more can you ask for?

All we need is your book writing contract, and you will get all the rights for your book.

I will be waiting to hear from you.

Best Regards,
**

“Best regards,” huh?

At first I thought this was a variant on traditional self-publishing operations, which aren’t really scams at all except to the extent that they might try to mislead you into thinking your book is gonna sell lots of copies. It just seems like a particularly lame version of the scam—how are they gonna get my book listed on Google News, exactly?

But then . . . I don’t know but I noticed something funny. I was curious about the company they were promoting so I typed it into the search bar, and this is what came up:


I don’t know if that graph of traffic stats is real or just made up, but if it’s real, could the whole purpose of this email be to get curious recipients to google their website, just to jack up the stats? Or is there some other angle to this that I’m missing?

The world of spam baffles me so much. I think these people should call up Wolfram Research to find out how the real pros do it.

11 thoughts on “Spam is so much fun! But sometimes it’s baffling.”

  1. This looked familiar, like Part 2 of your November 2020 “Today in Spam” post (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/11/20/today-in-spam/). Are these the same spammers? Or is this post a meta-commentary on plagiarism? Or is it a meta-commentary on computer-generated text? Or are we to ask whether, if computers generating text generate the same text, it counts as plagiarism? I’m confused, but perhaps this is the path to enlightenment.

    Reply ↓

    • “Are these the same spammers?”

      Good catch! It has to be.

      This sentence is from the previous post: “I am Christina Batchelor, Editorial assistant from Index of Sciences Ltd. contacting you with the reference from our editorial department.”

      The phrasing of “contacting you with the reference from our editorial department” is both identical and English-as-a-second-language awkward. The same is true for other statements in the message.

      Here is more on this particular scam:

      https://scicomm.plos.org/2019/02/11/predatory-publishers-want-to-write-your-autobiography/

      There is a website “Index of Science Ltd” that looks kinda sorta legit.

      Reply ↓

  2. I am happy to admit when I don’t understand something. This scam must work, or at least it’s being tested to see if it will work… but it’s beyond me how they could possibly be making money. Your guess seems as good as anything I could maybe come up with, and it still seems silly.

    Imagine the contributions to the betterment of humanity if scammers turned their creativity to something more useful! They certainly can be a clever lot.

    Reply ↓

    • Andrew is not the real target of the spam. Spam is almost never profitable.

      The way spammers make money is setting up a system (database of names, occupations, etc, a website, and so on) and then selling that to the next generation of spammers who get convinced they will make money with it.

      Reply ↓

      • Do you have any evidence to support that? I can well believe there is a Ponzi scheme aspect involved, but I’ve been under the impression that spam (and associated schemes) are generally profitable. I did see some evidence on this (I believe from investigations in NY State), but there is little data I’ve found. However, you can do some simple modeling and it doesn’t take a very high “success rate” to make spam profitable. So, if you have evidence that it is not, please provide sources.

        Reply ↓

        • A spammer gave a presentation at one of the defcons awhile ago and explained it. It was title “Meet a spammer” or something like that.

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