Five months ago, I started a fresh version of an experiment I sometimes carry out to catch spammers and con artists. I put a virgin email address on my main web page, but I made it the exact color of the background–in essence, it is invisible to the naked eye (unless you select the text, highlighting it). Why? Because spammers and con men use a technique where they create a “bot,” or an automated program, that “harvests” email addresses from web sites and other public text areas on the Internet. These bots look at the code of a page directly, and suck up anything that looks like an email address. Making it invisible to the naked eye assures that it was harvested by a bot. Doing this experiment gives me a window onto how it works.

Sure enough, within five days of putting up the address, a Nigeria con email came through the door, and the email has been increasing for the address ever since.

One interesting point I have discovered: the harvesting method is used predominantly by con artists. If my email address gets on a spam list, only about one in a hundred spams–if even that many–are con games. But the emails from the harvesting method are almost all con artists, perpetrating cons including the Nigerian scam, European “lotteries,” and Bank/PayPal/eBay account “update” scams. The lion’s share of the rest of the spam is from alleged stock brokers trying to sell shares–another scam, of a different type. Taken all together, bot harvesting seems pretty much dominated by criminals.

And now, Republicans.

I have started getting emails from right-wingers trying to spread their message, and they have come through the spam-catching email account. The most recent is from a web site called “ControlCongress.com,” a right-wing advocacy site, which sent me a spam titled “A Conservative Plan for Iraq.”

The fact that it came through the spam-catcher account demonstrates that either they use the same bot-harvesting technique as the spam-scammers, or they bought their email lists from the criminals. Either way, it’s clear what company they are keeping.

Not that any of this is much of a surprise…