Stealth Spammers
Jan 25th, 2009 by Kris
It is wrong I kind of like the creative spammers? Anybody can post a Wall Of Text about WoW gold. I like it when they put some effort into it. Finding them can be more of a challenge.
I’m especially tickled when one person uses more than one account to hold a conversation with themselves.
For example, on Democracy Forums we had someone make a first post:
My friend has been on the road a lot for her political nonprofit work. She has been eating a ton of fast food, which is just so unhealthy and wrong! I’m wondering, do you all maybe have a suggestion about how she can eat healthier on the road? I was thinking leftovers but they spill.
Someone replied, also a first post, telling them about an awesome new portable food storage system!
A quick look at the IPs revealed they were one in the same. In speaking with my admin on that forum he said “I thought it was some people who knew each other from another forum.”
As human verification systems get better, this kind of spam is happening more and more. We’ve all heard about the Belkin embarrassment.
This jerk has gotten his crappy youtube vid half a million views by posting on any and all forums pretending to be a woman who just watched his movie and is so moved by it she has to tell others. He’s learned he can’t get away with it as a first post and makes a few small replies before starting the thread.
A very polite and friendly gentleman who often goes by Emma Smith (he has other names) posts to several of my forums. Shelly researched and learned he makes his money referring people to movies with redirects from his homepage.
I see job listings for this kind of spam often. SitePoint has listings anywhere from $0.10 to $5 per post.
We need an English speaking person, older than 25, capable of promoting a software product on forums, being a good psychologist, capable of writing things as if he were a client or prospective client, creating an overall positive atmosphere around the product. It is not a mere forum posting job, it is a real marketing job, reading into black pr post, making them be ruined by your positive remarks, speaking as 3-4 different persons, creating a plot (script) of the conversation in advance, starting new posts on IT forums and maintaining a positive image of the company throughout it.
This type of spam takes more effort than the bots, but it’s more likely to slip through. Not enough mods know how to identify it. People who have day jobs outside of the community aren’t always cynical enough to be suspicious and start investigating when a newer user mentions a product.
Make your mods aware. Don’t let the “SEO experts” target your community. As spammers get smarter, so must we.
This is really ridiculous. But you know, we can’t expect that spamming won’t evolve with the times and that smart, creative people aren’t working on the other side as well. How much time does it take to do this and do it well? I can’t imagine. I’d be curious to hear more about these instances. Interesting stuff.
I had some of those one way conversations crop up on one of the travel forums I was moderating. It was somewhat amusing but I really despise all types of spam so I deleted it and IP banned them.