Myspace spam profiles
I maintain a “sleeper profile” on myspace for a friend of mine, who’s a guy. It’s not yet in use, except for sending the occasional message.
Today I got a friend request from Edda, who had a Gorilla for a profile picture. I checked the profile out, thinking it was legit.
At first it looked unremarkable - she had 16 friends. But then a gif file loaded, saying she’d moved her profile to Adultfriendfinder.
The file was on Photobucket (see here), but was served through a 302 redirect from this domain:
synchrism.info
The image links to that website as well. The domain was registered yesterday, and although it worked a few hours ago, by now it only serves up a socket error. I didn’t have a look at the website when I first found this, and the whois data is protected.
Either way, this is spam, pure and simple.
Tom just announced that they’d employed solutions against the spam on myspace a few days ago, but this might be rather hard to fight against. I’m sure other guys have seen it before, but since I’m female, and that profile is rather hard to find, this was my first time to see the “fake myspace profile”. And get this, she had 17 friends now, so people are unfortunately falling for this.
Well, in case the spammers read this, here’s another report (from Tom), about the legal success Myspace has in fighting spammers.
June 9th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
There are ways to “game” myspace without breaking any laws or the can spam act. The only legal liabilities would be in using myspace against the TOS.
-just another seo
UC
June 11th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Gaming MySpace whether legal or not, it is still spam. Since when have spammers really cared about laws anyway.
I have seen a bunch of spammy amature porn accounts on Flickr that lead you off to some other website. That is against Flickr’s TOS/AUP. But if they are careful they don’t really stand out from the rest of the millions of users so are hard to detect.
June 14th, 2007 at 11:17 am
I tried clicking on this link: “The file was on Photobucket (see here)”
but the only response was this:
“Page not found …but while you’re at Photobucket, why not try…”
Seems like a dead link…
June 25th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
I just got a friend request to my personal profile a few days ago. This time the domain used was sweepima.info. The MO is the same as the one sent to my friend. And below that there’s an affiliate link for a=5479&b=11639 at cpaclicks.
June 25th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
f-u–c-k off you h-o-e b-a0g
June 25th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
To jonnyn:
You just made my day! Those kinds of messages tells me I’m doing something right…