Spammers are Dumb...

Ghost

Seasoned Veteran
Joined
Jun 25, 2009
Messages
3,585
Reaction score
348
FP$
3,264
So I've been reading the spam comments I get on my blog, and some spammers are just stupid. I don't understand how the spammers actually think their comment will be accepted.

Here's their comment:
Still another useful article! Here is a very good word of advice pertaining to blogging: There are two reasons protein is an excellent nutrient. First, protein doesn’t add excess pounds to your body like carbohydrates will. Second, it helps your body build more muscle. The more muscle mass you have, the more efficiently your body will burn fat and calories.

Here's some advice about blogging......Facts about protein and nutrients.
Perhaps they're trying to get past a spam-blocker plugin, but even one of those would probably pick up on it.

Do spammers even THINK anymore or have they just given up? or do they just spam tons of blogs and hope some of them don't notice?
Anyways...It's dumb lol.
 
Spammer's are dumb indeed, they don't realize how easy it is to remove comments/posts from blogs/forums and how much of their time they waste no matter if they copy & paste.
 
Dreadlord said:
Spammer's are dumb indeed, they don't realize how easy it is to remove comments/posts from blogs/forums and how much of their time they waste no matter if they copy & paste.
I just assume they have bots that automatically send them all, so it doesn't even matter.

If I was a spammer, I'd target sites in my niche, not just random blogs that allow comments.
 
Spammers are a real pain, but I don't actually think they are that dumb. They wouldn't be doing it, if they weren't making some money from it. It's a numbers game for them, perhaps they spam 100 sites and have their comment published on one. Do that enough times and they begin to make some money from their junk links.
 
Fergal said:
Spammers are a real pain, but I don't actually think they are that dumb. They wouldn't be doing it, if they weren't making some money from it. It's a numbers game for them, perhaps they spam 100 sites and have their comment published on one. Do that enough times and they begin to make some money from their junk links.
That's very true.
It all depends on how much money they make.

I like the following explanation that I give people, regarding investment/profits.
If you spend $100 on Google Ads, and sell products worth $1, you might never make that money back.

If you spend $200 on Google ads, and offer $200 consultation sessions (because you're a lawyer), you have a high chance of making that money back - You only need 1 client.

So it makes sense.
Spamming doesn't cost much money, if any at all (depending on the setup of it all).
So if spamming thousands of sites/people costs almost nothing, they could easily make back that money.
So for them, it's a good investment.
 
Maybe they post unrelated comments not related to the blog and forum post, so visittors from search engines reading the comments on a blog, are more likely to click on their signature, or profile website link because their post sticks out for being unrelated to the topic of the post.

The regular active readers, and members would most likely downvote it, ignore spam, or report it to an admin or mod to delete it.

Spamming maybe a good investment for the short term, but a lot of countries now have anti-spam laws, so they can get in trouble with the law, so they need to hire a lawyer to defend them in court.

They also might get in trouble with the tax collector since I think most spammers don't declare their income, so they can hide their illegal online activities, but if they get caught spamming they might have to pay unpaid taxes and fines.
 
As I block everysingle comment with links or username with link attached, hard for them to go thru the spam blocker, if they even try to create a post to get accepted first, well, they have to know what they are talking about as I don't post useless comments, genuine poeple or not
 
I'm sure those are auto-generated (software) spun comments. That's typical blackhat style comment. The hope of the spammer is that your blog is unmoderated. That way they will get an instant backlink. These days, spam backlinks don't really help site SEO, but blackhat marketers still use them, laboring under the delusion they help. Anyway, simply delete and move on. This will always be a problem for bloggers.
 
I had a spammer early on today on my forum and it kept re-newing it's IP but thankfully I suspended the account from posting. 😉
 
Spammers are unfortunately getting more and more sophisticated by the hour unfortunately. They're finding more and more ways to crack forum registrations, reach email inboxes and gain more exposure. Spam costs the industry an unbelievable amount of money too.
 
They are smart enough to bypass many common anti-spam measures although, I just drop requirements of 10 posts or so before allowing users to post links at all.

CAPTCHAs are practically useless against them as they've pretty much got those figured out so, it places an ever larger burden on moderators to spot the content.

From what I hear, they even hire people to go through anti-spam measures in countries where labour is really cheap so, treating them like ordinary bots doesn't always help.
 
I also heard spammers buy old forum accounts, and hire people to go through the captcha since they can Spam up the search results on search engines by getting a lot of backlinks, so their search rankings are higher on the front page.

There also maybe hackers who hack old forum accounts to spam a signature because a lot of people pick bad passwords like abc123.
 
They are dump, but if you know countermeasures they won't be trolling on your site weird stuff. If it is a human spammer, that is more complicated though
 
For human spammers, making it easy for visitors to find the rules and code of conduct, or puting a warning about not spam during registration may help.

Being strict by quickly banning, and deleting spammer accounts may make them less likely to re-offend, and tell their spammer friends and the Blackhat spammer community that your site is not a good place to spam.
 
froggyboy604 said:
I also heard spammers buy old forum accounts, and hire people to go through the captcha since they can Spam up the search results on search engines by getting a lot of backlinks, so their search rankings are higher on the front page. .

Thanks for this warning. I wasn't aware spammers were doing this. I will prune my old forum accounts and lock access to members who have gone inactive and only had a few posts. Chances are, those accounts were from someone trying to build a forum account to sell anyway.
 
I notice there are a few members on forums who make posts, and latter add spammy or commercial links to their signature, and old posts after a few days or weeks of being a regular member.
 
Back
Top Bottom