Spammers are making profit even though they are only getting one response for every 12.5 million e-mails they send, researchers who hacked into the infamous Storm spam network have found.
Linked to the spam e-mails they sent out, a team of scientists created a legitimate looking pharmacy site selling "male enhancement herbal remedies".
The fake pharmacy site always returned an error message when potential buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details.
The researchers sent about 350 million email messages over 26 days, which resulted in only 28 sales!!!
The response rate for the campaign was less than 0.00001%. Even though the experiment saw a poor conversion rate, the researchers said that by sending out many more messages, the owners of the spam could be earning £4,500 a day, or £1.6m a year.