Category Archives: Spam

Dilemma: Spam or Not?

I hate receiving an email ad from a company that I recognize when I can’t remember for certain whether I signed up for email or not. Did they just reactivate an old list that I’d forgotten, or have they been acting shady, picking up email addresses but not permission?

If it’s an old, forgotten list that I really did sign up for, I should just unsubscribe and have done with it. Reporting them as spam would be irresponsible and would actually make spam filters less reliable.

On the other hand, if they harvested or bought my email address, I should report it as spam…and I shouldn’t trust the unsubscribe link.

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Honest Comment Spammer

While cleanning out the comment spam folder on Speed Force, I found this gem:

Hi this is a attempt to get noticed on the world wide web and hopefully spread the word about our services. It would be kind of you if you allow me to share my online marketing one the site. The company name is [REDACTED]. Thanks

I suppose you’ve got to give them points for honesty.

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Hello, New Friend!

Whenever I see spam that starts out with a subject or greeting like “Hey, friend,” I think of Fluffmodeus from the webcomic Something Positive:

TV Tropes describes the grotesque cute character as being “like an ’80s cartoon character who Care-Bear-Stared a little too long into the abyss…” Rippy declared him to be “the most annoying thing that’s ever existed.” Hmm, maybe he’s a spammer when he’s not haunting Kharisma? :-D

Oh, and the archives…definitely not work-safe.

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Call Your Mark a Sucker

My jaw just dropped at this advance fee fraud scam that showed up in the spamtraps this week. The whole thing is about how the reason you haven’t gotten your funds is because you’ve been dealing with fraudsters who have been impersonating Nigerian diplomats, police, etc., and how could you possibly be so naive?…oh, and if you’ll send me your personal information and bank details, I’ll make sure the real police clear things up so you can get your payment.

Seriously. Does this technique actually work?

Actual text of the email below the cut:

Continue reading

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Spam template

I love seeing it when spam software doesn’t quite work. Sometimes it’s just schadenfreude, and sometimes it’s interesting to see how the templates are structured.

Here’s one that showed up in a comment spam on Speed Force:

{Hi|Hello|Hey there|Thanks}, {very|really|truly|genuinely} {cool|nice|good|interesting} {post|article|stuff}. Such {insighful|entertaining} writing is rare these days. I’ll {surely|certainly} be looking in on {this|your} {blog|site} again {soon|in the nea

It’s cut off because they managed to plug it in as the commenter name instead of the comment itself (oops!)

I haven’t decided whether to call this “flattery spam,” or “kiss-ass spam,” but my general reaction when I see these (and I’ve seen a lot of them) is, “Nice try.”

If you like finding humor in spam, check out @lol_spam on Twitter.

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Silly Spam: Random!

In cleaning out the spamtraps, I found several variations of a message with just FWD as the subject. Inside: an image (not sure what of, since I’m using a text-only program to read them), a link, and then the following:

some random words here. some random words here. some random words here. some random words here. some random words here. some random words here.

…and so forth, repeated a total of 308 times.

I actually burst out laughing!

I think this qualifies as the most pathetic word salad/Bayes poison ever.

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A Lot of Effort to Disguise Some Spam

I found a comment in the spam folder for Speed Force that, on first glance, looked like an actual, relevant comment…to a different post. It was a coherently-written paragraph about how someone had “considered getting a second Captain Cold” action figure to customize it, but it was posted to an article about stalled miniseries. The author’s name and link were obvious spam, though (seriously, “watch full movies” is the best you can do?).

My first thought: They’d copied the text from another comment on the site. I’ve seen that happen before, but usually it’s comments on the same post. A search through existing comments didn’t turn up any matches, though.

So then I did a search on the rest of the web, and found the original comment on a review of an Atom Smasher toy.

Someone had gone looking for a site with a similar topic (comic books about super-heroes, action figures made from super-heroes), copied text from there, and pasted it onto mine…and yet they hadn’t bothered to match up specifics (like pasting it on a post about action figures or Captain Cold). So it’s not quite as sneaky as the one who followed a link in my post and pasted in text from the other page, but it’s pretty close.

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Essay Spam

Lately I’ve started getting spam for academic essay-writing services on this blog, and for some reason it really bugs me. I mean, more than the usual pills, porn, personals & fake antivirus crap.

Is it just that I’m more accustomed to the other stuff? Possibly, but I think it’s a little deeper than that. I think the reason it bothers me is that, beyond the spammer himself being dishonest, this is encouraging the target to be dishonest as well.

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Silly Comment Spammer…

Yesterday I got a strange comment that I thought looked a bit spammy. It was one of those sneaky comments that pretends it’s reporting a problem on your site. The layout looks off in Chrome, or is broken in Firefox, etc. Except, of course, when you look at it in that browser, it’s just fine.

This one claimed that they’d gotten an alert on their firewall when hitting the blog, and could it be related to one of your ads?

Unlikely given how few ads I use, but possible, since I had a third-party poll, some Amazon links, and a banner for Mozilla Plugin Check. Still, the author’s website looked pretty spammy, once I pulled out the extra w, so I put it back in moderation–

Wait, what was that about an extra w?

Well, they’d linked to wwww.[REDACTED].com. Kind of amusing, but I didn’t think anything of it until I had the chance to look for other sites with similar comments…and found that they all pointed to the broken site!

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Misdirected

  • Got a compliment on good tech support :-) … but it was intended for another company with a similar name. :-( #
  • I alternate between finding it amusing & annoying that I get spam for local businesses in Brazil. It’s a bit of a drive from SoCal. #
  • It’s sad to get Christmas cards for someone who used to live at your address. We’ve gotten two this year, but none last year. Maybe last year’s were still forwarded, and the forwarding order expired. #

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