Category: Spam

Somehow my post from May 12th, 2004 titled “Scott Richter is a Lying Scumbag” has made it to the #2 result (as of this writing) when Googling the name Scott Richter, even outranking actual Legitimate News Media Outlets. And today I’ve noticed a sudden surge in clicks from search engines pointing to that article (it… Continue reading Scott Richter Update 2005

There’s a new spambot which seems to be targeting WordPress blogs. It passes along a forged referrer which appears to come from a legitimate source, invariably another WordPress blog, and always from a permalink to an older post on said blog (rather than just the main site URL). How I’ve dealt with referrer spam in… Continue reading New Breed of Referrer Spam

Rule #3: Spammers are stupid. In another post to file under “you knew it would happen eventually,” I just got spam sent to an anonymous Spamcop email address. Allow me to explain why this is amusing: I’m a loyal user and supporter of Spamcop, a free spam blocklist and reporting service. When I get spam… Continue reading Re-enforcing Rule #3

Well it’s been months and my gmail account has now been compromised. I logged in the other day to find 11 spams in my spambox, none of them actually addressed to my actual address. Today it was 13. And 2 more just a few minutes ago. Most of them so far have been hawking pirated… Continue reading Gmail Under Attack

Checking my shortstats this evening, I see I’ve been slammed with another referrer spam attack. 111 hits in the space of a few minutes, seemingly coming from a website which did not, in fact, link to mine. Not only did they hit my home page, but they crawled all the various links on it, finding… Continue reading Noteworthy Referral Flood

I was just reminded of another means of obscuring an email address which I neglected to mention in my previous Maximizing Ham article: displaying an email address as an image. By using an image such as instead of in-line text, you fool harvesters who see nothing but code. This trick was pretty popular a few… Continue reading Ham Addendum: Image Replacement

I have seven email addresses: two at this domain (one personal, one administrative), one at Yahoo, one at Hotmail, one at Gmail, one spamtrap at facehugger, and one at work. All of these addresses combined get an average of about 5 spams per day. Yes, I said five. Even the spamflow into my facehugger trap… Continue reading Maximizing Ham

Note: This update refers to a previous post, Cheesy TV Ads are an Elaborate Privacy Scam. A scant two days after revealing the dirty dealings behind the “work at home” ads, a privacy policy was added to the xcareer/xmoney/xwhatever-else websites. The timing of this is curious, as my post was quickly indexed by Google and… Continue reading Prospect Performance Scam Update