Abstract Spam advertising is a business that continues to exist despite attempts to intervene at many of the levels visible in the actual spam messages (i.e. spam filtering, URL blacklisting, domain and hosting takedowns). It continues to exist, in spite of these adversarial pressures, because it fuels a profitable enterprise. In this talk, I will present our efforts to perform a holistic empirical analysis that quantifies the full set of resources employed to monetize spam advertising counterfeit goods by collecting extensive measurements of three months of email spam including over 100 purchases from spam-advertised sites, along with an in-depth analysis of leaked data that provides a rare view into the inner-working’s of major affiliate programs that monetize spam. Through this analysis we provide valuable insight into the cost structure of these affiliate programs and strong evidence of payment bottlenecks in their value chain. Speaker Bio Damon McCoy is an assistant professor in the computer science department at George Mason University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2009. In 2010 and 2011, he was a Computer Innovation Fellow at the University of California, San Diego. His research includes work on the economics of e-crime, wireless privacy, anonymous communication systems, and cyber-physical security. More generally, he is interested in exploring and improving the security and privacy of large-scale systems.