When you think of spam, what are the 'products' you immediately think of? Pharmaceuticals — particularly Viagra — are an obvious category. Porn is another, and so are get-rich-quick schemes, 'penis enlargement' scams and 'big' cons like Nigerian 419 schemes. If you're a spam connoisseur, you might add fake diplomas, 'mortgage leads', so-called 'OEM' software and stock spam. Between them, these probably make up the bulk of the spam you receive. But there are other 'businesses' that seem to go together with spam like the proverbial horse and carriage and now make up a small but growing part of your daily spam intake.

A couple of weeks back, I added a support mail form to the website of the company where I work. A day or so later, the form started to get hit by a comment spammer. A day or so later, the volume of incoming comment spam was large enough that I went back and made some changes so that the spam could be quietly tagged and dropped in the bit bucket.

Most of the spam looks to be the work of a single spammer, and conforms to the same model: a brief bit of boilerplate saying Great site! or Cool disign! [sic], and a URL to a blogspot.com site with five more-or-less related links on it. The sites include a few penny stock-themed sites, a scattering of pill sites ... and a whole slew of sites linking to various cellphone ringtone vendors. For some reason, this particular comment spammer seems to be pushing the ringtones for all he's worth.

Domains linked to include ringtonejamjam.com, funmobile.com, free-phone-ringtone.com, flycell.com, greatringtonedeals.com, playphone.com, dada-mobile.net, blinko.com, ringtonesmadness.com, pigmob.com, bombasstones.com, and 5starringtones.com. That's a lot of domains selling ringtones, and I could have added more to the list if I hadn't got bored.

The domains are heavily interconnected. For instance, the first three in that list are the same operation under different names. The hand of Azoogle — a name well-known to anti-spammers — can be detected in several places; many of the sites say that they were designed by AzoogleAds, and many of the links use Azoogle's azjmp.com redirector (others use a similar redirector, valtrk.com. All of the sites have essentially the same format: a homepage with a bright, eye-catching graphic, various carrier logos, and a three-field form for you to enter your cellphone number, plus a sea of small print to advise you of just what you're getting into — if you take the time to read it.

Some of the offers sound pretty uncompelling. For instance, $19.99 paid monthly to ringtonejamjam.com gets you 14 Poly Ringtones credits per month if you're a Cingular customer. It's hard to tell how much a Poly Ringtone credit is actually worth — we know that the PRC is currently trading at about 1.42PRC to the dollar, but how many ringtones does that actually get you? Doesn't say. (The larger question of how many ringtones any one person actually needs is also left unanswered). But at least Cingular customers are doing better than Nextel customers, whose $5.99 weekly payment gets them one joke delivered daily. Hell, $6 is about the price of a beer here. Buy me a beer and I'll tell you as many jokes as you want to hear in the time it takes me to drink it. Some of them might even be funny.

Now, some people want ringtones, and there's nothing wrong with meeting the demand. Maybe $19.99 per month is worth it to some people. All the same, the industry seems to be a little less than squeaky clean. For example, read this posting about theringtoneszone.com. The post includes video showing the website helpfully 'auto-checking' the checkbox by which you agree to their terms and services. theringtoneszone.com, incidentally, uses nameservers hosted at the ironically-named cybercon.com — as do our friend ringtonejamjam.com and its peers.

Ringtone domains are also advertised by email spam as well. For instance, unsolicited ads for flycell.com periodically show up in my mailbox, along with other ringtone sites (some of which seem to be linked to Adteractive, a company whose exact association with some of what I call the bouncing bulkers remains difficult to pin down).

Are the domains I've named here responsible for the spam sent in their name? I have no idea. We're into the murky waters of affiliate marketing here. The links that the blog and mail spammers send out are usually bristling with affiliate IDs and will route you through a forest of redirectors and click-counters before they eventually dump you on your destination ringtone site. There's nothing to say that any of these companies has authorized the use of spam to promote their sites. There's also nothing that I know of to say that they've tried particularly hard to prevent it: affiliate programs of this kind, which give affiliates a strong incentive to spam and very little incentive not to, are ripe for abuse. My guess is that even if the 'advertising companies' that run these elaborate networks don't sanction the use of spam directly, they don't very much care so long as the clicks keep coming in.

Are these companies disreputable? You tell me. I have my suspicions about any company that feels the need to register a few dozen domains to host near-identical sites. It's not as if Google, for instance, saw the need to pass itself off as 'great-searches-4-you.com', 'web-search-u-like.net', and 'all-the-hits-u-can-use.biz'. Legitimate companies aim to create a single identity and give it a good reputation; when a business sets out to create multiple identities, I wonder if they're not more interested in hiding from their reputations than advertising them.

There's another thing about ringtones that's interesting. Think about who buys them. Aside from that one annoying guy in your office, the biggest consumers of jokey ringtones and catchy pop-fragments are children and young people. Marketing over the Internet to children is problematic because they don't have credit cards. But what if you could sell a product that kids want ... and charge it to their cellphone bill? Welcome to sleazy marketing nirvana.

Ringtones meet the requirements for a great spam-advertised business. There's no physical product to source, store or deliver. There are no huge demands in terms of hardware or software, and you can set and advertise as many sites as you want. Once you've created your sites, they can earn money with no further human supervision. Charging the customer's phone bill rather than their credit card makes it harder for them to dispute the charges (have you ever tried to get a refund from a phone company?) And while the initial cost is low enough to appeal to impulse purchasers, some reports suggest that if you do sign up for certain of these services, you'll have a merry time getting them to stop billing you every month thereafter.

I don't know enough to say whether any of the domains I've mentioned are directly responsible for the blogspam and other kinds of spam that promotes them. I do know, however, that ringtones and spam are a very cosy match, and there's a fairly tangled web of connections there that could probably benefit from a little investigation.