Hard to spot spam
I got this comment today. The content seemed fine, but I noticed a spammy looking domain. Even when looking at the site, I had to view several pages to figure out there had to be a con somewhere. It was a cell phone site, and it looked as though it was built around a news feed of some sort.
K, let’s look at the comment:
Hi!
I have a TC1000 compaq pc tablet. I have had it for maybe a month now and
about a week ago i switched it on and the screen went blank and in the top
left hand corner it said ‘operating system not found’ and will not
proceed. I have tried everything i can think of and searched high and low
and cant fix it. Can anyone help, i really need to to work. Thanks and
have a good day!!!
Looks fine, right? Except if it’s a spam comment, you’ll find the exact same text somewhere else. So I looked, and found the original post - it was written in 2004!
And it was posted manually.
October 10th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
What was the payload?
October 10th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
Just lots of different ads. Three column layout. Only the middle one had content. It had Adsense, but the ads with images were more noticeable. Those links all went through this site:
nsg.org.ua/phpadsnew/adclick.php
October 10th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Talking about hard to spot, I’ve been getting highly relevant comments to my posts, but they all lead to spam sites / emails.
Don’t approve them, but it sure is surprising how spammers are reacting.
Thank God for moderation.
October 10th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
I find commenting with Blogger is pretty hard and I have not received any spam comments. However I think its so hard that I am not getting comments in general.
October 10th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
Ajay…cutting off your nose to spite your face? If the comments are highly relevant, then why not approve them? Do they not add to the blog? Isn’t that what “highly relevant” comments do? Childish.
October 10th, 2006 at 10:59 pm
Hi Spamhunters!!
I don’t understand
Who is a spammers??
And what is that?
Thank you for your response )
October 11th, 2006 at 2:27 am
To darth_maul:
Relevant comments is no excuse to spam. We’ve seen relevant spam for a long time now, and we don’t like it. My example is very rude. That’s a question that was asked and answered a long time ago. Doesn’t matter if it’s relevant to that post (it was about computer problems). It’s parasitical, and won’t be allowed.
To SouIfPL.er:
Check this page: http://spamhuntress.com/wiki/Spam_types
October 11th, 2006 at 10:52 am
Yeah I was just pointing out something similar on here: http://wiki.chongqed.org//WikiForum Spam with the message:
“Sorry for your time…. Why i can’t see images on this resource?
My Browser is: Opera.
Thank you.”
This is spam which I saw appearing today on a couple of wikis. No link. Just that same message posted all over the web, causing confusion to lots of webmasters, for no reason.
October 12th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
If a comment is relevant to the original post and I believe my readers will benefit from the info or if I have a really good sarcastic comment, I will approve it but I remove the links to their spammy sites or any reference to their urls and respond to their comments with the reasons why I removed their links. Funny how they never come back and spam me again!
October 14th, 2006 at 9:26 am
Hey there! I own Tablet PC Questions and saw in Google Analytics that 23 people came from your blog post. What is up with the forum posts landing on your site? Any clues how they are doing this so that I can get it stopped? I noticed spammers are using the @tabletquestions.com domain to send out “feedback” too.
October 14th, 2006 at 9:34 am
To Layne,
Sigh…
You got a link from my site, when I demonstrated that the spam comment I got was scraped from somewhere else. THAT link had nothing to do with spam. That you got 23 referrers from my site simply tells you that many people clicked on the link in my blog. That has nothing to do with spam.
And when it comes to mail spammers using your domain - turn off catch all e-mail, and you won’t see the bounces. Spammers misuse a lot of domains that way. I maintain a mailserver, and I see a lot of that.