Let's talk about spam writers.

Goatse sounds tempting.

I've always wondered this! Who on earth writes the vile stuff?

Although, recently I've been receiving spam with poetry in the header (eg "The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea") and 1st line that gmail shows as standard ("...in a beautiful pea-green boat"). What is the purpose of this?

Still, it's more fun than the ability to greatly enlarge body parts that I don't own, buy dubious meds or give all my personal details to Nigerian aristocracy-in-hiding

Sushhhhh.....as soon as they get my money they will deposit in my account a vast sum...well, let's just a large amount. I sit with bitten nails praying that he will be able to escape real soon. It's not easy in Nigeria. Just never know who to trust.

SouthernFriedJulie said:

We get hit with spam literally 24/7. Email, IM, forum, and even text on phones.

Who are the writers behind the drivel? Have you ever written spam? It has to be fairly lucrative with the amount slathered on the internet. Can it be considered a 'gig'? And /would/ you write something to be used as spam if paid enough?

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It's not written in the sense you mean. The person pressing Send on the mass mailer just sticks some off the cuff stuff in--or simply pastes in a URL and the mass emailer generates the text from a corpus of scraped text (copied by a bot) from the Web.

SouthernFriedJulie said:

That covers some of the emails, but not forum posters.

My first at home gig was to answer Yahoo Answers questions and include a link. The gig was to provide the best answer possible and hopefully drive traffic. Not /too/ spammy, but there has to someone doing this dirty work here.

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The paid spam posters on AW are using dedicated clients, written for vBulletin, mostly.

There are occasional drive-bys, too, who answer ads on blogger jobs, craig's list or Amazon's "mechanical turk" for per post payment of a few cents.

I'm afraid to even open anything that looks spammy. My spam filter is pretty good, so it mostly goes in the junk folder. But if I get curious and click, then I get whammed with 5 more spams that slide through my filters.

What I think is creepy is how the return addresses often look similar to people I know. Sometimes it's even addressed from me!

And once, I did a google search on my own name and was led to a fake web page that lifted some of a news article that ran in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Crap! I work hard to get a byline, I don't want it turned into spam!

As for revenge, these guys do a better job than I ever could: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,338908,00.html

SouthernFriedJulie said:

:-( That's no fun to imagine.

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The Mods, and members, are so very proactive about letting Mods, and Supers know about Spam, and then removing it, that honestly, only very very rarely is a spam post up for more than a few minutes.

There's an awful lot of "clean up" work being done all the time.

Spam is written by programs. There are many ways to do it. Some just generate "word salad" in an attempt to bypass filters. Sometimes the real message is in a picture that's supposed to cover up the text. Other times they just pick a random passage off of Project Gutenberg or other source of uncopyrighted texts.

The more specific stuff, about your sexual inadequacy or Canadian drugs, or whatever, is written by either the spammer, or the spam service provider. A program usually does clever stuff like swapping out the offending words like VIAGRA with foreign and symbol characters.

It's a myth that spammers make money--they don't. The people making the money are the spam service providers. They will sell you a "business start up kit" complete with addresses, message generating software, and they'll even send out your fake drugs if anyone actually bites.

The other kind of spam, the ones that ask for your bank account information, is much more lucrative. The Nigerians are mostly coasting through on people who are curious enough to send them fifty bucks or so before they get tired of it.

The spam here on AW is mostly "comment spam." A person is provided a "work at home" kit, which consists of signing up for bogus accounts on AW and other places and setting up the robot to post the junk. If someone were to click on a link and actually buy the crap, the home worker would get a commission. However the scammer probably makes more money selling work at home kits than he does selling the actual program--on trafficked boards like this one the spam is gone in minutes, and abandoned boards are abandoned, so no one sees it anyhow.

Can't say I really notice spam these days. Gmail never lets any of it through.

This popped up in Newswise...they say 70% of spam comes from China. Hmmmm.

Of the total reviewed domains, 48,552, 70 percent, had Internet domains – or addresses – that ended in the Chinese country code “.cn”.

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I didn't know that .cn meant China. I'll have to keep an eye out for that.

And get this:

Further encouraging the Chinese spam epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap domain names. Domain names based in China can cost as little as one yuan, or 15 cents in U.S. currency. In contrast, U.S. domain names can costs as much as $35 a year, with a portion of the fees going toward efforts to detect fraud and abuse like spam. The low domain rates in China encourage Web page operators to buy numerous domains, leading to a continuous stream of spam promoting those various sites.

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SouthernFriedJulie said:

That covers some of the emails, but not forum posters.

My first at home gig was to answer Yahoo Answers questions and include a link. The gig was to provide the best answer possible and hopefully drive traffic. Not /too/ spammy, but there has to someone doing this dirty work here.

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Is that like "not TOO pregnant?"

What was noticed in the '90's is that spammers can't spell (these things are generally not written by experienced writers, as hiring and paying them would cost too much). When engaged and confronted about their Internet-terms-violating activities they complained about their "free speach" rights, but of course what they do is a clear violation of virtually all ISP's terms of service.

I first saw the this site describing spam in 1997, and it hasn't changed significantly since then:
http://spam.abuse.net
It's a good exercise to click on the "About Spam" link on the left, then read through the links on that page.

Email spam "works" because it's so cheap to send out millions of emails. If a spammer sends out 50 million emails and gets orders totalling $50, he's making a profit. Most spam is sent through hijacked computers, thus since the spammer is stealing services, it's free for the spammer to send - it used to be open relay mail servers (computers that run the Internet), but now it's usually through zombie computers and botnets.

stldenise said:

This popped up in Newswise...they say 70% of spam comes from China. Hmmmm.



I didn't know that .cn meant China. I'll have to keep an eye out for that.

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Also, .ru is for Russia, and the percentage of Russian websites one might come across that have viruses or scams is remarkably high.

Salis said:

Can't say I really notice spam these days. Gmail never lets any of it through.

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Yeah, gmail is very good at filtering spam.

But scammers are another story - I put a laptop on Criag's list and was bombarded by people claiming to be from Egypt or Nigeria, saying they would PayPal the money after they receive proof that you mailed the item. It was really annoying.

Alpha Echo said:

Yeah, gmail is very good at filtering spam.

But scammers are another story - I put a laptop on Criag's list and was bombarded by people claiming to be from Egypt or Nigeria, saying they would PayPal the money after they receive proof that you mailed the item. It was really annoying.

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Not half as bad as putting a laptop on eBay and having one of these jerks win the bid. I never did get my listing fees back for that...

I used to spam forums all the time. I was a member of the forums of course. Want to see how I did it?

Just like this...




I'm serious. It was a game for most of the forums I used to participate on. For some reason it doesn't seem funny anymore.

ETA: We did this when we got hit with spambots... we'd reply with the spam picture.

Here's a tool to find out if your computer is part of a botnet: http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/en-US/tools/security_tools/rubotted

(That's from Trend Micro, which is a well-known and respected anti-virus company.)

Let's see:

There are the people who get those How To Drive Traffic To Your Website books, get accounts (where their user name is their business name or a phrase that people might seach for on Google, e.g. GoldFishTankCleaner or FancyShoes), who include a link back to their web page as their sig line, who come racing through starting a half-dozen threads in a dozen minutes, then never show back up to continue the discussion, or who drop another half-dozen brief comments in existing threads, comments that make it clear they haven't read the discussion to date.

If you do go to their sites, they're all about trying to sell you something, because they're trying to Monetize Your Web Page, which they learned how to do by answering a spam email or going to a fraudulent web site (be one of the new breed of Internet Millionaires! Let me show you how I make $50,000 per month on the Internet with just half an hour per week! Work from home! Foolproof system requires no skill!)

Discussion boards have gotten savvy to their tricks; we recognize them within those first few minutes and the reaction ... isn't what the spammer expects.

There are continually ads on writers sites for people to write copy for the internet at $4 a pop, or something similar.
What do you think those articles are used for?
This whole SEO writing thing is peculiar, but has it's devotees. The website Accentuate Writers is highly devoted to it.

I don't know if getting domains for a quarter in China instead of six bucks from GoDaddy is what drives SPAM. People doing sites for the money wouldn't worry about a few bucks.


First rule of spammers: have a brightly colored clickable banner.

Q. How many writers does it take to change a lightbulb? A. Two. One to screw it most of the way in, and one to supply the final suprise twist.

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LOL And here we thought it was the producers who did the screwing.

Team 2012 said:

There are continually ads on writers sites for people to write copy for the internet at $4 a pop, or something similar.
What do you think those articles are used for?
This whole SEO writing thing is peculiar, but has it's devotees. The website Accentuate Writers is highly devoted to it.

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These are usually ad farms--websites that contain articles that purport to be about an interesting if not particularly popular search term, but which are usually just excuses to display Google ads and collect the two one thousandths of a cent or whatever it is. Sometimes they're even automated--Rare exotic birds are a very interesting topic. It's important to do research on rare exotic birds before you spend any money. There are lots of good books are rare exotic birds--etc., etc. Sometimes they get college kids to "intern" and make them spew out this stuff. And some of these sites don't actually make much money--the money making was from the fifty or hundred bucks the site owners had to pay to get the book and software that tells suckers how to do this.

Team 2012 said:

First rule of spammers: have a brightly colored clickable banner.

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You know dude, I really wouldn't boast about that--you are very much being watched. I'm about two seconds away from putting on my Admin hat and booting your ass.

We just booted another spammer.