Comment spammers want to hear from you

Published by ndixon on November 17th, 2008

I once wrote about my experience with "ethical spammers" back in 2005.

In that instance, the wiki spammer added an almost apologetic message attached to the spam that they kept the original content intact (while adding a huge chunk of spam links, of course).

This morning, I discover this message pushed into the comments of one of my blogs…

Author : SpoomiDibebot (IP: 194.165.42.49 , 194.165.42.49)
E-mail : babader@mymail-in.net
URL    :
Whois  : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=194.165.42.49
Comment:
to: Admin - If You want to delete your site from my spam list, please sent url of your domain to my e-mail: stop.spam.today@gmail.com
And I will remove your site from my base within 24 hours
webmastegz

The comment did not get through, of course, because I always have comment moderation applied to blogs. (I have no reason to believe this spam comment is related to the above mentioned ethical spammers.)

I give this spammer 10 bonus points for such an original means to harvest genuine email addresses from blog owners to add to his other (email) spam list. Nice work, Mr. SpoomiDibebot (I’m guessing that is not his real name).

I wonder if such emails will also open up the possibility of unmoderated posting on the relevant blogs, too. I guess most web users will have a primary contact email address, the same one they might have attached to a blog’s admin account. The spammer then has the admin’s email plus its associated blog address. Comment moderation on bogs tends to revolve around the email address of the commenter - bingo! the spammer has a pre-approved email address which might by-pass the moderation process.

Loathe them as we do, I have to admire this one for such a (rare) original idea.

Tags: comments, ethics, spam
Posted in Everything else |