Spammers command six-figure salaries working from home

Affiliates in a spam network can make $180,000 per year or more, delivering traffic to pharmaceutical sites, online casinos or fake anti-virus web pages, according to SophosLabs.

In a presentation at the Virus Bulletin Conference in Geneva last week, Dmitry Samosseiko, manager of SophosLab in Canada, talked about his interactions with the Russian "Partnerka," a group of spam affiliates. The Partnerka are organizations promoting pharmaceuticals or pushing fake security products and otherwise getting money from spam and related activities.

“Thousands of affiliates, each calling themselves a ‘webmaster,' work day and night to drive as much user traffic to their partners' stores as possible,” Samosseiko said in the research paper he submitted to the conference.