While most of us don’t trust spam, if you order something advertised through it, be it pills, knockoff Rolex watches, or software, it will probably end up at your door. That’s one of the many surprising conclusions uncovered by researchers tracking exactly how spam works (PDF) from alpha to omega in the transaction process.

Not only that but researchers were interested to see that the credit cards that they used did not become subject to fraudulent activity, nor were the email accounts that responded to the spam offering hit with a significant increase in spam.

So should you start buying stuff from spam? Hardly. But it’s interesting to see some of the basic biases we have against, myself included, are slightly unfounded.

Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain [via F-Secure]

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