More Comment Spam

I turned on the computer this morning and found this email:

Geoff,

It seems you have been hit by the “comment crazies” again. Good luck

deleting them all.

Dan

Dan is right. Luckily I have some protection, making the job of removal easier than it could have been. I use a program that allows me to cut off comments after a certain number of days. I must run it manually… and it’s not my first choice to ever cut off comments. So, only the last 10-12 days were hit. Unfortunately, each was hit multiple times.

This was also a more sophisticated method of “comment spamming.” The links had only been registered in the last day or two. There were dozens of them. They all led back to a very nicely designed, benign looking home page. There were even flowers on it! It was the same exact page design on each individual site.

Looking at the links in the comment spam gave you a better idea of what was going on. The links were to inside pages and contained an embedded user name and password.

So, it seems, this spammer was trying to pick up money by sending people to sites that use affiliate marketing. And he was able to ‘tag’ each link with his user name so he could get paid.

Instead of selling something himself, he was selling traffic to other sites.

This is very sophisticated. The fact that these spam comments came with so many different domains and in such a random fashion, shows decent programming skills and planning. The homepage on each site (which was not meant to be seen, except randomly) was also well designed.

I’m afraid this is not the last of this character.