V1agr4 Spam Is Old And Busted, Valentine Spam Is The New Hotness
I gotta hand it to the spammers, they’re a smart bunch and I’ve been noticing a new and troubling trend for months now. It’s possible this is an old tactic and I’ve only just noticed it on Geeknews.
All week Geeknews has been receiving and catching dozens upon dozens of spam comments every day with ‘Valentines’ in the keywords.
No doubt they’re trying to drive up the pagerank of the sites they’re linking to as men and women worldwide are searching with that holiday keyword as we gear up to the big day, Thursday Feb 14 2008.
A couple of things I’m interested in monitoring here:
1. How quickly will the ‘valentine’ keyword fall out of favor by the spammer(s)?
2. Will it slow or stop in the few days leading to Thursday?
3. Will it continue up to that very day when it’s basically too late to capitalize on the holiday searches because the blog may not be crawled in time?
4. If this spammer is targeting blog comments in blogs located primarily in the Western civilizations, then I suspect they will transition to the next big holiday after Valentines which is Easter. So, assuming this ‘ad campaign’ i’m watching is relatively successful enough for him/her to continue the trend, when will I see the first ‘Easter’ related spam comment?
Note: I did receive one Valentine spam with what might be considered a crossover spam to Easter:
Happy bunny valentine
Here’s a small sampling of the Valentine spam comments caught just in the last 3-4 hours:
Quick free thoughtful valentine’s gifts
Recipe for valentine chocolate candy
Regalos para dia de san valentine
Geometry valentines poems
Funny valentines quotes
Sailors valentine gallery nantucket
Fun valentine gift for him
Simpson valentine
Gift golf valentine
Gift guy teen valentine
Gothic valentines e card
Hallmark best valentine
Happy bunny valentine
Related posts:
- Valentine Blog Spam: Final Update
- Valentine Blog Spam Update #1
- Lost In The Underflow: My Sweet Geeky Valentine
- Spam Update
- EU: “More than half e-mails are spam, originator is US”
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Out of curiosity Andy, Is there a reason why you don’t put a Captcha? As you know mine is very simple (and Shamus Young’s even simpler) and I get no more than one spam a week (where I would receive multiples in a given day when I was over at Blogger)….
I probably will add a captcha if it ever gets unmanageable, but the thing is I find spam fascinating. My interest and insight gleaned from it currently outweighs any minor inconvenience of clicking the ‘delete all’ button from the moderation queue once in a while.
I guess it’s something I should blog about because the fascination goes back to my early days in self teaching of computer science and viruses of the 80’s.
In other words…it’s fun!
Please do…. I noticed your fascination about spam the other day and it is something I’d like to know more about!
[...] is an update to the post V1agr4 Spam Is Old And Busted, Valentine Spam Is The New Hotness on the 10th of Feb where I talked about a new and troubling trend (i like using that [...]
[...] is the final update to the post V1agr4 Spam Is Old And Busted, Valentine Spam Is The New Hotness on the 10th of Feb where I talked about a new and troubling trend (I like using that phrase). In [...]