The Nigerian Spammer Anthem

October 21, 2005

A recent Los Angeles Times article reveals that the 419 scam spammers have their very own anthem: a song titled I Go Chop Your Dollars by Nigerian recording artist Osofia:

"419 is just a game, you are the losers, we are the winners.
White people are greedy, I can say they are greedy
White men, I will eat your dollars, will take your money and disappear.
419 is just a game, we are the masters, you are the losers."

We may joke about the 419 scams.. after all, who in their right mind actually falls for this stuff? But like all spammers, they do it because it works:

[Samuel] sent 500 e-mails a day and usually received about seven replies. Shepherd would then take over. "When you get a reply, it's 70% sure that you'll get the money," Samuel said.

Spam only became a problem for me about a year and a half ago, but clearly it's here to stay. I've used POPFile for about a year to cut down on my email spam**. Some people swear by challenge-response human verification systems such as SpamArrest, but as Scott Mitchell notes, this system has some issues:

While the challenge/response system was effective in reducing my spam intake from about 100 messages a day to around 1 or 2 messages a day, the approach, in my estimation, was not ideal. One big disadvantage was that fewer people took the time to respond to the challenge email than I had anticipated, for two reasons:

1. Some people don't want to take the time to follow instructions for a challenge email. Maybe their message wasn't that important after all, maybe they're busy, or maybe they just don't like being told what to do. These people's messages, I reckoned, weren't that vital. If you can't take two seconds to respond to the challenge, then just how important is that email you're sending me?
2. What worried me most, and led me to suspend my C/R anti-spam system, is that I noticed some people weren't responding to the challenge email because they never received it! This unfortunate circumstance could happen if their own spam blocking solution halted my challenge email. A couple folks informed me that Outlook 2003 categorized my challenge emails as spam. Others using a similar challenge/response anti-spam system would never get my challenge as my challenge would generate a challenge on their side.

The "I challenge your challenge!" scenario is particularly amusing. And on top of the two issues Scott highlights, there are other social problems with challenge/response spam blocking.

Although I've had great success with POPFile, which uses Bayesian filtering techniques, I had no idea that there's an even better technique: Markovian filtering. That's what the CRM114 Discriminator* uses. There's an outstanding slide deck (pdf) that explains how it all works. In a nutshell, Markovian filtering weights phrases and words, whereas Bayesian filtering only looks at individual words. How much better is it? I'll let the CRM114 author, Bill Yerazunis, pitch it:

For the month of April 2005, I receieved over 10,000 emails. About 60% were spam. I had ZERO classification errors. ZERO.

As of Feb 1 through March 1, 2004, 8738 messages (4240 spam, 4498 nonspam), and my total error rate was ONE. That translates to better than 99.984% accuracy, which is over ten times more accurate than human accuracy

I measured my own accuracy to be around 99.84%, by classifying the same set of about 3000 messages twice over a period of about a week, reading each message from the top until I feel "confident" of the message status, (one message per screen unless I want more than one screen to decide on a message.) and doing the classification in small batches with plenty of breaks and other office tasks to avoid fatigue. Then I diff()ed the two passes to generate a result. Assuming I never duplicate the same mistake, I, as an unassisted human, under nearly optimal conditions, am 99.84% accurate.

Most Bayesian techniques top out at around ~98% percent accuracy with a little training, but Markovian can achieve a rarified 99.5% accuracy. The most notable Windows port of CRM114 is SpamRIP.

* A reference to the movie Dr. Strangelove. In the movie, the "CRM114 Discriminator" is a fictional accessory for a radio receiver that's "designed not to receive at all", that is, unless the message is properly authenticated.

** I have since switched to K9 because it's simpler and faster-- and does the same Bayesian filtering.