Spam What's that about?

[TomGoodheart]

OK, bit late in the day but ... can anyone explain spammers to me?

Time and time again we get someone with an IP address from somewhere in the Southern Indian continent quoting an earlier post in an attempt to seem like an interested new member.

Why?

Firstly, I can usually spot that it's a quote since they are rarely quite in context. Secondly I delete them as soon as I spot them. But even if I left them active ... what do they hope to gain? Do they then put their login details into a spambot so in a week or so we get dozens of adverts for Russian brides and Viagra? And who would click on those anyway?

So why do they bother? Apart from the fact that I presume they are paid to do so.

Yours sincerely,

Puzzled of Buckinghamshire.

.

[Chris Perkins]

Do they usually have links in their profile? Perhaps it's just so that the search engines index those and improve the ranking for people that search for whatever it is. Or it possibly could be simply to appear to be real so that the IP address/user ID gets marked as a good one so that they get access to spam somewhere else. Or maybe it's some kind of spambot test programme to help them develop their spamming skills.

I really don't know. It does seem a bit pointless.

[HistoricCoinage]

Often it's the case where they appear as genuine and then flood the forum with links to other sites in order to increase search rankings.

One of the infamous automated scripts for this that is absurdly effective in many cases is XRumer - here's the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer

[Rob]

Do they usually have links in their profile? Perhaps it's just so that the search engines index those and improve the ranking for people that search for whatever it is. Or it possibly could be simply to appear to be real so that the IP address/user ID gets marked as a good one so that they get access to spam somewhere else. Or maybe it's some kind of spambot test programme to help them develop their spamming skills.

I really don't know. It does seem a bit pointless.

Not necessarily. The post that started this thread was one Richard deleted this morning. As it was a post that I made verbatim, it was clearly a spam related issue, but got deleted just as I was going to report it. If they have links it is easy to see, but no link spammers are a bit more problematic. One of the regular features of the spammers with links seems to be that there is a capital letter at the beginning and again in the middle of the id, which is in itself about 8 or 9 letters long.

[Guest dafaa45]

Or it possibly could be simply to appear to be real so that the IP address/user ID gets marked as a good one so that they get access to spam somewhere else. ????