WebProNews » spammers

Are Spammers Impeding Twitter Growth?

Chris Crum — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:08:11 +0000

Over the weekend, Twitter found itself victim to the tomfoolery of 4chan as the online community’s members apparently launched an initiative to make "#gorillapenis" a trending topic. They were successful, but Twitter of course responded by removing it from the trending topics.

What is 4chan?

4chan describes itself as "a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images." It is known however, for its online hijinks like the infamous YouTube Porn Day, when the site’s users got together to put a punch of porn videos on YouTube, claiming it Wikipedia credits 4chan with the popularization of Internet memes like lolcats, Rickrolling, and "Chocolate Rain".

Twitter Spam in the Spotlight

While the #gorillapenis prank may not seem like a big deal, I have to disagree. It has forced me to write the words "gorilla penis" in a WebProNews article. Seriously though, it does show how easily Twitter can be abused.

Even now, "#farts" is a trending topic. This will likely be removed as well, but this kind of nonsense will likely just continue until something is done about it.

Fake Accounts and Twitter’s Numbers

Those responsible for the prank had to create fake Twitter accounts. It makes you wonder how the creation of fake accounts can skew the numbers that show Twitter’s growth. Last week, we looked at new registrations in June, and the numbers looked to be up there with the month Oprah joined, but how many of these were fake? How many have been fake all along?

Those (at least some) who have been using Twitter know that there is plenty of usefulness to the service, but when newcomers sign up and see what all the hype is about and see a list of trending topics with things like #farts, #gorillapenis, #crotch, or whatever else, they may dismiss Twitter as an immature waste of time, and decide to just forget about it. This will not help that user retention problem.

Yahoo Goes After Copycat Spammers

Doug Caverly — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:48:33 +0000

Phishing emails occasionally make it through spam filters, and sometimes, they even look genuine. So Yahoo is trying to protect the recipients (and its own reputation) by suing "Yahoo! Lottery Spammers" who use its name in hoaxes.

The company filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in New York City, according to a statement. Yahoo cited the Federal Trademark Act, the Federal CAN-SPAM Act, and several state laws as being on its side.

Yahoo Mail Spam Protection

John Kremer, the vice president of Yahoo Mail, also said, "Yahoo! is 100% committed to protecting our users from fraudulent e-mail messages and this lawsuit sends a clear message to spammers. We are going after individuals who have attempted to negatively impact the e-mail experience for consumers across the Internet. Through our continued litigation efforts, our top goal and priority is to further protect Yahoo! Mail users and the public from this type of fraudulent activity."

A legal victory may not, in a practical sense, close the case – we’ve seen spammers survive big fines before. This development at least falls into the "nice thought" category, though.

As a related gesture, Yahoo’s offering anti-spam tips through a Yahoo Mail site. And here’s a word to the wise: official Yahoo communications will always include exclamation points after the company’s name. Even CEO Jerry Yang, who doesn’t capitalize anything, follows this rule, whereas spammers (and lazy writers) often don’t.

Spammers Getting Around Captchas

Janet Meiners — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:22:00 +0000

Talk about creative workarounds. Spammers have found a way to crack captchas so they can steal your email address. As if the vice of spamming isn’t bad enough, they are using a virtual stripper named Melissa to get real people to unwittingly participate in their evil craft.

They created a game that is delivered via malware that is installed on your computer. When you launch Internet Explorer you are introduced to a game. In the game players are shown captchas (text embedded in an image), which are intended to stop computers from signing up for accounts like free email addresses. Each time they fill one out then a virtual woman takes off more of her clothes. Then spammers get their way and you get more junk mail.

I didn’t know what Captchas stood for until now but here it is (in case you need it for your next trivia game): “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”

So far the program has been used on the sign-up process for Yahoo webmail. It builds in a reward system rather than just hoping people will respond to a request to type in the letters.

Two security firms, Trend Micro and Panda Security have discovered the tactic but note that it’s not widespread. The program runs on Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, and Server 2003. To avoid contact, run anti-virus and anti-spyware program updates. The technology to block spam has been working for the past six years.

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Spammers Sentenced, Ordered To Pay AOL

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:22:23 +0000

It makes one wonder how convicted spammers are treated in prison. The most recent pair of spammers prosecuted saw witnesses from five states come to testify against them and co-spammers turned on them for (presumably) lighter sentences.

Jeffrey Kilbride, 41, of Venice California, and James Schaffer, also 41, of Paradise Alley, Arizona, were sentenced to 72 months and 63 months in prison, respectively, fined $100,000 and were ordered to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL. They also were ordered to forfeit over $1.1 million in commissions they made spamming inboxes with pornographic emails.

Kilbride got a stiffer sentence, says the Department of Justice for obstructing justice "by attempting to prevent a government witness from testifying at trial." The DOJ didn’t say whether it was one of three "co-conspirators," one of eight citizen spam recipients from Massachusetts, Texas, Iowa, California and Arizona, or other witnesses.

After the passing of the CAN-SPAM Act in 2003, Kilbride and Schaffer logged into remote servers in Amsterdam to make it appear the messages were coming from outside the US. They were actually sent from Phoenix.

Evidence at trial established that they set up a shell corporation in the Republic of Mauritius, and were funneling proceeds to offshore accounts there, as well as on the Isle of Man.

Show there’s no honor among spammers, three "co-conspirators," Jennifer Clason, 32, of Tempe, Ariz.; Andrew Ellifson, 31, of Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Kirk Rogers, 43, of Manhattan Beach, Calif., all turned on Kilbride and Schaffer in court, and pleaded guilty for their roles in the operation.

The millions of unsolicited messages sent had fake headers and domain names, and included hard core pornography images in the emails themselves in order to entice recipients to sign up for memberships. Some were viewed by recipients’ children, even after filters were set up to block such content.

FTC Slaps Hoodia and HGH Spammers

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:16:23 +0000

The Federal Trade Commission, via a district court judge, ordered eHealthyLife.com to stop sending emails and making allegedly false claims about its Hoodia and Human Growth Hormone products.

The FTC is prosecuting the case under both the CAN-SPAM Act and the more recent US SAFE WEB Act, saying that its spam database received over 175,000 messages making unsubstantiated claims about weight loss and health benefits deriving from use of the company’s "HoodiaLife," HoodiaPlus," "HGHLife," and "HGHPlus" products.

The FTC is also claiming that the spam messages contained false "from" addresses, deceptive subject lines, and lacked an opt-out link or physical postal address.

Assumedly, the physical address would have been the US, Canada, and/or Australia, as the three named defendants, Bruce Parker, Lisa Kimsey, and Xavier Ratelle, principles of Spears Systems, Inc. (doing business as eHealthyLife) hailed from those three countries.

The federal judge ordered a temporary restraining order and asset freeze to stop the company from emailing and from making any more allegedly false claims about their products.

This Guy Will Ask Spammers To Stop…

Brian Vuyk — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:01:20 +0000

…Spamming You In Exchange For Links!

The beauty just came into my blog’s spam filter this morning:

Name: Anikrichard | E-mail: anlikivanna.80@mail.ru | URI: *spamlink* | IP: 72.9.235.218 | Date: September 5, 2007

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory@yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

This is one of the more appealing spam emails I’ve seen – in return for him doing you a favour, and asking the nasty spammers to stop, all he wants is a link to his site.

I don’t have the time myself, but someone should talk to this guy and get his URL to ‘add a link’, then send him off the the Google Webspam team. Would be fun to see what happens. If anyone wants to take it on, let me know – I would love to see how it turns out / how quickly the guy is banned.

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Comment Spam, Long Copy Referrer Pages & SEO Tools

Richard Hearne — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 19:56:36 +0000

Just about everyone knows that spam is part and parcel of life. We just live with it and try to do our best to minimise the impact it has on our daily lives. Unfortunately spam is a particular issue for the SEO industry, as unscrupulous search marketers often turn to spamming techniques to make a quick dollar.

I get my share of spam at Red Cardinal. Generally I just delete the crap left by ‘kind’ spammers, but occasionally I do a little digging to see what some of the particularly nasty spammers are at. More about spammers a little later – but first, let me tell you what I think of ‘Long Copy’.

Long Copy Pages for ‘SEO’ tools

I like to include screen shots of pages in my posts. I have a nifty little app that lets me grab entire screen shots from within the browser, not just the visible area.

I wanted to include the sales pages for two SEO tools, both of which use ‘long copy’. Here’s the screen shot of the two pages:

These pages are so ‘long’ that I had to reduce them by a factor of ~14 just to get them that small. Maybe they’re ‘Really Long Copy’, if there is such a thing. (If you want to view those pages in all their glory I’ve ‘published’ the URLs a little further down the page. In case you’re wondering what this is all about I’ll come clean in a second.)

These pages appear to be affiliate sites for two well known SEO tools. I’m not 100% sure what’s going on with these pages as they don’t appear to have affiliate IDs appended to the outgoing URLs. Perhaps the affiliate program uses HTTP referrers for identification. Perhaps these pages are actually proprietary sales pages. I’m don’t know for sure.

So what’s the problem with those sales pages? Purely my opinion, but they look and feel like ‘get-rich-quick’ pitches to me. The message I hear sounds like ‘I’ll sell you this great benefit. But wait, there’s more. Buy now and I’ll include x and y’. Yes, lots of marketers defend this technique. And I know it’s true that ‘long copy’ can be effective, but only when the content is compelling and does not feel like I’m being ’sold’.

Long Page Copy – Read or Turn Off?

When I see long copy pages like these I just turn off completely. As I mentioned, I just think ‘get rich quick’.

I’ve stuck my neck out on this issue once or twice (hello Copyblogger). I sometimes wonder if perhaps long copy is a peculiar American technique that we just don’t fall for this side of the pond? (And if you’re interested Brian Clarke, a.k.a. Copyblogger, has written a post about the death of long copy.)

Back to the comment spam

So taking a step backward for a moment. Why am I highlighting those two affiliate pages? Keyword Elite and SEO Elite are marketed and sold by Bryxen Software (a firm owned by Brad Callen I believe). As with so much of the US on-line marketing industry, Bryxen uses ‘Long Page’ techniques to sell there software. They also make heavy use of affiliate programs to multiply their sales. A couple of weeks ago Red Cardinal received multiple comment spam like the following:

SEO Elite | +http://SEOElite.gurubuddy.com | IP: 216.16.246.184

seo firm…

Automate your link building efforts and rank high in the search engines easily….

and

Killer Keyword Tool | +http://Keywordelite.find-your-stuff.com | IP: 216.16.246.184

keyword lists…

Generate huge laser-targeted low competition, high demand keyword lists in minutes….

These comments were dropped on multiple posts, and, as you can see above, were left by the same IP. Odd? I think not. Probably the same bot. Checking the WHOIS shows find-your-stuff.com registered to someone in Singapore, while gurubuddy.com is privately registered.

Both of the tools being promoted are from Bryxen Software (Brad Callens company +http://www.bryxensoftware.com/), and the linked sites appear to be affiliates.

Comment Spam by ‘SEO’ Firms – Why SEO has such a BAD NAME

I am sure of one thing – spamming blog comments with links to long copy pages, such as those pictured above in miniature, is one of the main reasons the SEO industry has such serious reputation problems. It is very, very hard to blame people for viewing the SEO industry with suspicion. After all, every day the results of spammers litter our websites and pollute our on-line experience.

The reputation problem is only compounded given that the products marketed by the above spammers are well-known SEO tools: comment spam + SEO tools = SEO spammers. And how can we blame people for making that connection.

I’m very interested in your thoughts on ‘long copy’, and whether you have been converted by a ‘long copy’ page like the ones above.

And if you’re thinking of buying these tools, think about this…

I neither own nor use either of these tools. They may well be excellent tools, and perform their respective task extremely well – I don’t know. But if you want to do the world a favour, don’t buy products that are marketed by spammers.

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MyBlogLog Updates Features Due to Spammers

Andy Beal — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 16:56:33 +0000

I feel bad for the guys at MyBlogLog. Ever since being acquired by Yahoo, they’ve not exactly had a comfy ride. Things escalated this weekend, with reports that spammers had found an exploit that allowed them to add themselves as "co-authors" on as many communities as they wished.

Saturday evening, a member discovered an exploit where you could send someone a request to join their community as a co-author and then automatically approve the request. In other words, someone (dare I call them a jackass) could force you to be a co-author of their community. I have no idea why they would do this, other than a negligible bump in marketing, but who ever said jackasses made sense?

To their credit, they’ve reacted well and today announced new steps to improve the community and hopefully reduce the amount of spam. Future features include:

* We’re going to post an official Terms of Service (ToS) and hold people accountable.

* By default, you now see only message from your own contacts.

* We will include the text of the comment and associated controls (delete,reply, etc) in the alert email.

* We will limit users to only five requests for co-authors a day.

* We will limit users to join 15 communities and add 15 contacts during any day.

* After the first five are complete, we will set up a comment approval system

All of the above will be welcomed by those who are active MBL users, but I think MBL faces a bigger issue than spam. I for one have taken off the widget that loads images of the most recent visitors to the site. While I’m still tracking visitors and using avatars on comments, the widget was just too slow to load. It’s a real shame, because I believe it was the widget that made MBL grow so fast, but it’s also their achilles heel.

I’m hoping they’ll figure out a way to speed up the load times and provide better customization of the widget – maybe iFrames are the answer here. In any event, the MBL guys need to tap into Yahoo’s (in)finite resources to get these updates done quickly. MBL did well, because it was unique, but I’m already hearing about new services that might challenge them, so they’d do well to keep ahead of the curve.
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MyBlogLog – A Honey pot for Spammers

Mathew Ingram — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 21:04:38 +0000

There seem to be mixed feelings about MyBlogLog, the social networking service that Yahoo bought in January, and the one whose widget you can see in my sidebar, as well as the sidebars on lots of other blogs (it’s the one with a row of pictures of different readers who have visited my blog recently). Some people think it’s a waste of time and have gotten rid of it, but I think it’s actually quite useful – I can see with a glance who has been reading, and I often check out their blogs or their MyBlogLog community as a result.

Like so many other social networking services, however, there is a growing problem with people trying to "game" the system to achieve a variety of spammy ends.

As John Chow and search guru Danny Sullivan have reported, they have been approached to become "co-authors" of other sites – and in some cases were actually made co-authors without agreeing to become so. Robyn Tippins of SleepyBlogger says her husband, a pastor, was added as the co-author of a porn site, which was probably somewhat awkward.

As far as I can tell from the comments on blogs such as WebMetricsGuru and John Chow, the co-author additions were made by Bradford Knowlton of SEO Adwords – who says in his comment and on his blog that he did it to point out the loopholes in MyBlogLog. In a comment over at Darren Rowse’s Problogger, Eric Marcoullier of MyBlogLog says that the service is working on closing the loophole.

I haven’t become co-author of any site I don’t know about (although I should check to make sure, I suppose), but I have experienced another MyBlogLog "feature" in the past – which Solo SEO wrote about awhile back – which is people setting up accounts and uploading photos of themselves that are simply logos for their company or website, since they appear in the strip of headshots and are thus free advertising.

Unfortunately, the more popular a site or service like MyBlogLog becomes, the more attractive it becomes as a target for spammers.

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Spammers Catch Wind of MyBlogLog

Neil Patel — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 15:53:53 +0000

MyBlogLog is on so many popular blogs that it was just a matter of time before it started to be abused by spammers.

At first, people were able to sign up for fake accounts under other people’s name and now users are able to leverage it for free advertising.

Michael Jensen reports that by using Opera you can visit blogs on a constant basis which will cause your profile to always show up and if you do this to high traffic sites like TechCrunch you can gain a lot of traffic as well as increase your brand recognition. And if you think about how TechCrunch charges 10,000 a month for a 125 by 125 ad, this is a great way to get free advertising.

With this weeks announcement of Yahoo acquiring MyBlogLog there is a good chance that these vulnerabilities will be open for a while because Yahoo has a track record of moving very slowly. And the bad part about this is that the spamming is just going to get worse. What is going to be next, people spamming 1000s of MyBlogLog users by messaging them to read their blog?

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Neil Patel is an Internet marketing consultant for ACS where he has lead Internet marketing strategies for companies such as Hewlett Packard and Samsung. Currently Neil blogs about his marketing experiences at Pronet Advertising.