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Tech Support Scammers Invade Spotify Forums To Rank in Search Engines (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by msmash on from the clever-workarounds dept.

Tech support scammers have been aggressively posting on Spotify forums to inject their phone numbers in a bid to vastly improve their odds of showing up on Google and Bing search results, a new report claims. And that bet seems to be working. From the report: They do this by submitting a constant stream of spam posts to the Spotify forums, whose pages tend to rank well in Google. While this behavior causes the Spotify forums to become harder to use for those who have valid questions, the bigger problem is that it allows tech support scammers to rank extremely well and trick unknowing callers into purchasing unnecessary services and software. BleepingComputer was alerted to this problem by security researcher Cody Johnston who started to see an alarming amount of tech support scam phone numbers being listed in Google search results through indexed Spotify forum posts. The tech support scams being posted to Spotify include Tinder, Linksys, AOL, Turbotax, Coinbase, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Norton, McAfee and more.

5 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Comment Spam is News? by bengoerz · · Score: 2

    I realize that December is slow, but comment spam doesn't seem newsworthy.

    1. Re:Comment Spam is News? by sconeu · · Score: 2

      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

      --
      General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
    2. Re:Comment Spam is News? by Altrag · · Score: 2

      Its huge news! A scammer figured out how to game Google!

      And 3 hours from now we can expect the follow up story where Google tweaks their algorithm to compensate. Hurrah!

  2. This is where MODERATING is done. by SeaFox · · Score: 2

    Spotify is a music site. Aren't discussions like this off topic for the entire forum?

    They could probably set up automated moderating to remove posts with certain keywords, required-review for the first several posts by new users, etc and stop a large swath of these before they even show up. But that would be too much work for the company.

    Everyone wants their own little walled-garden area for social interaction between users, but no one wants to take the responsibility for administrating them anymore. The result is Disqus embedded everywhere, and that appears to be not-moderated at all in my experience.

  3. So, call them? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    We could go 4chan on them and start calling them. Tell them we saw their posts for free technical support on Spotify and then ask them a random question found on Stack Overflow. After a while, they might be actively trying to take down their own content spam.