We had a post here last night that could have been generated by a computer about ring tones. It was disjointed, lengthy, and had several links that frankly I suspected would have loaded your computer up with something bad.

Fortunately thingmaker was on the job, but still, what is it with these guys? As far as I am concerned it is criminal behavior.

 

Unfortunately Bill, spammers are the bottom feeders of the Internet. They are a fact of life. The moderators of the AAC forum have been blessed with some powerful tools in our spam fighting arsenal.
t
hgmjr

 

The only good spammer is a bannned spammer.

For the longest time I didn't understand why they did it. I saw no way whatsoever they could be making any money. Then a software guru friend of mine explained it.

Their real victims are their clients, and we're just ammunition. The real victims pay the spammers a fraction of a penny for each hit on a site. The spammers don't care if it is a valid hit from a potential customer of their client or if it is a forum moderator checking for spam. The client pays the spammer for every hit on the site.

The spammer can write or buy software for spamming, and put many thousands of bits of spam out for us to click on. Then they send their client a bill.

...hmmm...

...thinking...

What if...

What would it take to let these clients know they're being ripped off? How might one automate shooting an e-mail to the real victim to let them know they're paying for fake hits?

 

Spammers just set up their software, or try to find new ways to bypass the protection. The computer sends out thousands of attempts to spam. The clients only need a few people to actually fall for what ever crap they are selling. The links usually take you to pages full of various ads, to tempt the curious. Some attempt to install software to make your computer more spam friendly. It's brute force marketing, eventually they find customer. If it's a fraud, then every sale is pure profit. Few people report being scammed (online or in person), it's embarrassing, and unless the loss is substantial (can't afford to pay the price of foolishness), most won't take the time or risk going public. If there were a simple way to report the scam, and some reward for doing so, doubt spamming would such profitable endeavor.

 

I've read in a few places that the links in the spam aren't for us, so much as for Googlebot. Link-spam is supposed to increase the Pagerank of the sites relative to their competitors, so people who are actually interested in this stuff and search for it will go to the customer's site rather than a different one.

 

Here is a link to the wikipedia section on spam. It tends to backup the comments that have already been forwarded.

hgmjr