Spammer Ducks For Cover

rabidgremlin writes "The New Zealand Herald has an article about a NZ based spammer who has shut up shop after being at the receiving end of an anti-spam campaign. Good riddance I say, but some of his comments ("never intended to break any regulations" and "I'll just stick to search engines and web sites - that's still plenty of fun and money.") had me wondering if he and other spammers are as really naive as the article makes out."

Comments

Booo-hooo

[The Bungi]

He had received more than 20 phone calls, five of them obscene. [...] he had been subscribed to a gay-dating site and his email address had been added to "tons of email lists". [...] "I have already banned my 5-year-old from answering the phone," he said.

Well, cry me a river. I'm sure that there are 5-year olds out there whose parents were a bit concerned about their kids receiving penis-enlargement emails and links to porn websites. Oh, and "tons of email lists"... I thought everything these fucks did was "opt-in"? Does he mean to insinuate that that's not the case? Bwahaha.

Cry me a river indeed. Maybe this is a good way to kill them off.

so instead of spamming..

[gl4ss]

.. he will devote his time to making linkfarms and other bogus websites with zero content? yeah that sounds like a plan to feed your family.

for the one's that don't know, it involves making sites that attract clicks(by looking like there could be for example emulation roms downloadable, or pron from there) from for example google and link to other sites of the same author to get the authors sites up in the search, thus polluting the search service with meaningless s**t making some fields of 'research' quite impossible to search with google without scripts for filtering that kind of stuff out of the results (doesn't need that much of a work with googleapi, and there's just few of these assholes making these sites and they tend to use the same referral id's on their ads on all of their sites making it a bit easier to filter them this filtering on client side needs a lot of bandwith though,and isn't that fast, obviously).

i'm wondering if somebody has made a decent easy to use program/scripts to use BIG blacklists with google (i hacked something together some time ago but it's not exactly easy to use for everyday stuff)?

spammers do seem to drink their own kool-aid

[bennomatic]

I've had SPAM-vertisers try to sign up the company I work for as a client, and I've had them try to convince me that it's OK to advertise that way. One guy got really aggrivated when I tried to explain that when it takes 20 minutes a day to delete all the viagra ads you get, 20 minutes for the mortgage ads, etc..., that very very very few people actually feel that they have been provided with a service when they receive SPAM e-mail.

I don't think, for the most part, that they are naive in the classical sense of the word; I think that they are closer to delusional. They have been given all the information they need, and they have chosen the interpretation which is going to let them do what they want to do.

However, I have seen a couple of occasions where a SPAM has been followed a couple of days later by an apology, where it truly does appear that someone has had a break-through experience and now understands that SPAM is a bad idea, where they truly did not understand that previously.

One down...

[CoffeeDad]

The problem is that *real* spamlords sell/rent/MLM convenient little subscription kits, services, tools and utilities that enable mindless drooling head-bobbers like this to join the ranks of spammers. No way of telling now, whether it was just another spammerzombie, or one of the real kingpins. Shoot 'em all, I say.

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