The impersonating guestbook spammers have been caught
Michael Pollitt and The Guardian went looking for a guestbook spammer who misused the names of key anti-spammers (yes, he misused mine too). The kick is that the spammer used Michael’s e-mail address, and later added that of The Guardian as well. The result was a flood of guestbook postings acknowledgements, and some seriously irritated journalists.
The search culminated with the story today:
The Guardian:
On the trail of the spammers
Michael Pollitt’s blog: On the trail of the spammers
My gripe is that without media attention, it’s hard to get anyone to do anything about spammers. How about we target them one by one, and get their accounts with affiliate schemes forfeited?
May 11th, 2006 at 8:22 am
Finally a positve move against spammers!
May 11th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
I agree, this story is pretty great. I am surprised that ev1 would be so unresponsive. They certainly must be in bed with the spammers.
May 12th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
One possibility would be to sue hosting companies that do not respond.
But if that is impractical, filing a DETAILED complaint with several Business Trade and Government Agencies could start the ball rolling.
On the terms of agreement Web page, these very concerns have been addressed as being violative.
May 14th, 2006 at 4:08 am
Well let me explain. Im that evil bad guy who looking for your guestbooks, blogs and forums, then adding them to spam list and pressing red button that activates spam program. And what we have? Next day u have hundred messages about different pills and casino and stuff in your page. U, guys, must understand that my point is not to make you click to one of those links or stuff. I dont really care even if u read those messages. The point of spam itself is posting valuable links on your pages. Much links i posted - much more my original site (where to those links leads to) get popularity. Much more cash i earn. So dont be so mad at us. We r not as bad guys as u all think, we working really hard, and we making money. And most of u, guys, who hate us dont even understand the point of guestbook and blog spam. Thats sad.
Oh by the way, hate to say it but i have to add your blog to my spam list. That is my job, nothing personal.
May 14th, 2006 at 5:11 pm
How dumb could you be to add an antispam blog to your spam list? You know none of your spams are going to show up for whatever purpose you think you have for them. No person or search engine is going to see them except the admin of the blog. Clearly adding this blog is entirely meant as revenge for fighting spammers.
You are not working real hard either. Spamming is easy, that is why so many idiots do it. They don’t know how to do anything else. If spammers actually had popular sites they would not need to spam. You don’t see Amazon or Google spamming websites. They once were startup internet businesses. The only difference was they had well desinged websites, good products, and did not use sleazy marketing.
May 15th, 2006 at 3:39 am
I understand, only too well, the ‘point’ of spam and I make sure my blog is kept clean of it. However, spam is destroying guestbooks, blogs, and forums. For example, figures from Akismet show that 88 percent of comments are spam. Ann Elisabeth, Joe, and many others are working hard to reduce this number and your comments will only make them more determined.
May 15th, 2006 at 4:45 am
Dear Mr.Guestbook-blog.Spammer, if you spam my guestbook I will follow your tracks and make all your affiliate accounts terminated and your sites banned. You spam us (Ann, Joe, me, and other spamfighters) = you loose money. It’s my fun and it is a personal thing to me.
May 15th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
Well, at least I finally get a look into the mind of a spammer.
Mr. Guestbook-blog.Spammer, you’re one very depraved individual.
Though you may be trying to earn a buck by “working really hard” to get your link on someone’s website, what makes you believe you deserve a link on someone else’s website that they probably worked very hard to build. You’re earning your money at the expense of others, not only that, you’re wasting their time.
It’s not your property to deface, and yes, forcefully adding your nonsensical off-topic links is defacement. Instead of trying to justify your actions, consider taking the high ground and not piss off people. But, then again, you probably won’t stop until someone crashes your servers by trying to get their links plastered all over it.
May 17th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
My site is hosted by a reseller of thePlanet, and I am not happy to hear that thePlanet and EV1 have merged.
June 1st, 2006 at 11:51 am
Seeing EV1 again did not bring back good memories. When the Umaxppc search spammer was at his peak I had a long running one-sided communication session with EV1. Despite polite and informative emails sent to quite a few of their contact addresses they really did not give a shit - despite the rather nasty javascript exploits they were hosting on these spamvertised sites.
EV1 really are complete and utter scum in my personal opinion.
June 10th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
Чем всякой херней заниматься - учите PHP! Защита легко от спама ставится!!!
Than in everyone херней to be engaged - learn PHP! Protection easily from a spam is put!!!
June 21st, 2006 at 4:43 am
If you think EV1 are bad, try dealing with “Layeredtech” - I once reported a guestbook spam within about 5-10minutes of it being posted (as I was already in the admin section deleting & reporting the last lots).
I posted the message as it appeared………. date, time, IP Address, etc.
Their response 2 - 3hrs later?
——————————————————————————–
“Please provide a larger portion of the websever logs showing our IP spam your guestbook.
Thank you,
Jason
Abuse Department
Policy Enforcement Technician
ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY at http://layeredtech.com/aup.shtml”
————————————————————————————-
Pathetic or what? In the end I just block the entire 72.36.*.* range of IP addresses….. and when that failed…. I password protected the directory the guestbook is located in so no one can post there until further notice (and have since forgotten the password to get back into it).
August 1st, 2006 at 3:51 am
Layered tech are wankers. I have sent them 15 support tickets this morning, and all i wanted them to do was plug my old HDD in my server!
STUPID WANKERS!
August 14th, 2006 at 5:34 am
Hello Everyone:
I am the webmaster for over 300 websites and we have been slammed by the 3 Guestbook/Forms Spammers for over 6 months now. We are in the process of converting all of our website’s guestbooks and forms to include human intervention.
We have had to take down several websites as well as dozens of guestbooks and forms as a result of these 3.
We have created a database of over 20,000 pieces of spam from these three jokers alone. All entries have the IP, date, time, message (spam), as well as whois trace routes.
We are preparing to litigate and would be happy to provide our databses to anyone else pursuing these individuals. It is our hope that making this database available to you will assist you in your own efforts.
Please post a message if you have an interest.
We thought about posting a reward for their fingers but not sure if it’s legal…lol
August 14th, 2006 at 6:08 am
[…] Guestbook litigation […]
August 14th, 2006 at 10:02 am
Are your spammers the same as my spammers? Have a read of my postings on stopping the guestbook spammer (in several lengthy parts) on my blog as well as the two pieces I wrote in the Guardian. Should be enough technical info there for you to say if it’s the same people.
August 14th, 2006 at 11:06 am
Hello Michael:
I believe they are the same 3. The 2 Russians and the one punk from the US.
I suggest to all that they post a message in their guestbooks and/or forms that states that multiple spams (attacks) are prohibited and that anyone who does so is damaging property. These people must be notified that (and it must state) that these types of entries are prohibited.
We are looking into anti-graffiti laws as well as several other violations
these people have committed.
We will post additional information as soon as the lawyers are finished reviewing our claims, including whether this can be expanded into class action status.
August 15th, 2006 at 8:31 am
Hi IrishVette,
Please e-mail me (e-mail address on my blog) if there’s anything you want to say or ask in private. There were two Russians involved with the problems I had, one of whom was directly responsible for the spamming in my name/e-mail. The other Russian spammed in the Guardian’s name after he read my first spamming story. I know of a US company with many more web sites than you have - they were spammed heavily by these people too.
I’d be interested to follow your progress in the next few weeks.
August 15th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
just to play devil’s advocate for a minute..
1) you aren’t going to put a dent in webspam with this lawsuit 2) you aren’t even going to stop spam on your website 3) you may take these 3 guys down, but they will get replaced by 6 others
if you want to make a legal statement, that is fine, but you have to realize that is all the case would be..
from a more practical standpoint, given a finite budget and amount of time, i would recommend spamproofing your website instead..this will be cheaper and serve your interests better in the long-term..spamproofing can be as simple as doing basic modifications to blog comment mechanisms (ie..renaming the trackback script, forcing a captcha, etc) or as complex as building your own guestbook script (still not that complex). most of these webspammers use off-the-shelf webspam tools (as evidenced by the spammer who posted above) and won’t take the time to reverse engineer a unique website..any decent php/.net coder should be able to manage this with minimal effort (i happen to be a .net coder). rentacoder is a good place to start
now, having said that, it depends on your motives/objectives. if you are trying to make a legal statement (and only that), the lawsuit makes sense..otherwise, spend your money and time elsewhere
August 15th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
I too got attacked by spammers on my travel/ design blog. Set up for my friends, clients and family to view whats happening in my world.
As my programmers/hosts blocked me from FTP accessing my site, I had to take down the section that you could leave a reply in wordpress as it was too time consuming deleting all the posts from the robotic spammers.
I dont mind some customised spam emailed to me occasionally, however bulk mail and robot driven spam really draws the line of what the net should be used for… knowledge, communication, information and adult porn.