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Friday 30 November 2012

On the ingenuity of spammers

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I just checked my comments and saw that I had three of them. One was clearly spam, but it wasn't until I took a closer look at the other two that I realized they were spam as well. One of the comments appealed to my vanity. It thanked me for the video I had posted and asked me to please write more (since I was so good at it) and not rely on just posting a video. I was about to reply when I realized that this comment was to a post that didn't have a video! The true giveaway, though, was that the poster included a link to his own commercial website. The other commenter appeared to ask a question: "I have a blog like yours, and I get a lot of spam comments. How to I avoid this?"  Very, very, clever. The best clue in this case was that the comment was vague enough that it could have been sent to thousands of blogs. The other clue, of course, was the link to his own site. The last clue was that all 3 comments had been to the same post. Well, keep trying guys. You may as well know now, though, that I'm not going to approve any comments that appear to be spam. And a link to your own site is usually a dead giveaway.

2 comments:

  1. Surely, some folks must fall for it, or they wouldn't keep doing it.

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  2. The closest I have come to that was an e-mail sent to my connected account. The writer claimed to be interested in publishing what I wrote. It was so generic and unspecific that I assumed it had to fit the category of spam or as the hackers call it, phishing.

    Grace and peace.

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