The team’s methods were bold, but harmless. They hacked into an existing spam ring, hijacked its traffic, and redirected victims to a fake payment processing page. The resulting data confirmed what most people already thought they knew about spam networks: their success depends overwhelmingly on scale and high margins, not a high purchase rate, to make money. Pretty good! But a later passage in the studywhich was conducted a few years ago, didn’t get quite as much attention:. The making money off spam emails that these networks are wildly successful, in other words, might not be correct. I followed up with one of the contributors to the study, Chris Kanich, to see if he and his colleagues had been able to shed any more light on the overall economics of running a spam enterprise. In Russia, where the most prominent affiliate networks have been able to thrive, these programs are known as «partnerka. But even with this relatively albeit synthetically vertical business plan...