I'm curious as to what might be the motive for today's attempt to flood the forum with spam. We've had these in the past from time to time. It can't be to advertise a service or a scam, because of the random subject matter. Can this be an individual with a grudge against the forum, or something like that? Seems pretty pointless and ineffective.

Doesn’t seem all that random. Customer service numbers for a handful of actual businesses. If you google the phone numbers I think they’re legit (edit: perhaps not; see later post) and the top results will be posts like these on lightly- or unmoderated forums (so there’s no deletion), so I’m guessing that it’s motivated by SEO. People in India (in today’s cases) is paid a pittance to make a certain quota of posts in some digital sweatshop

2 hours ago, swansont said:

Doesn’t seem all that random. Customer service numbers for a handful of actual businesses. If you google the phone numbers I think they’re legit and the top results will be posts like these on lightly- or unmoderated forums (so there’s no deletion), so I’m guessing that it’s motivated by SEO. People in India (in today’s cases) is paid a pittance to make a certain quota of posts in some digital sweatshop

Yes but why such a concentrated burst of them, with many of them being just repeats of what they posted a few minutes earlier? Seems very strange to be some kind of commercial strategy. But maybe it’s just an unintended consequence of how these guys are remunerated or something: sudden panic to meet targets, leading to a splurge of posts to meet a deadline.

6 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Yes but why such a concentrated burst of them, with many of them being just repeats of what they posted a few minutes earlier? Seems very strange to be some kind of commercial strategy. But maybe it’s just an unintended consequence of how these guys are remunerated or something: sudden panic to meet targets, leading to a splurge of posts to meet a deadline.

I’m only guessing, but if you’re being paid by the post, it’s probably more efficient to stay at the same site (several of the accounts were sockpuppets) and perhaps we were thought to be an easy target if there are multiple spammers. More posts raises the SEO score; I don’t know if multiple posts at the same site are weighted equally or discounted.

What I don’t understand is why a company would adopt this strategy, unless it’s a competitor trying to poison the goodwill these companies might have. But they aren’t trying to convince the few people here, they’re trying to reach the millions of people searching on the keywords in the posts.

11 minutes ago, swansont said:

I’m only guessing, but if you’re being paid by the post, it’s probably more efficient to stay at the same site (several of the accounts were sockpuppets) and perhaps we were thought to be an easy target if there are multiple spammers. More posts raises the SEO score; I don’t know if multiple posts at the same site are weighted equally or discounted.

What I don’t understand is why a company would adopt this strategy, unless it’s a competitor trying to poison the goodwill these companies might have. But they aren’t trying to convince the few people here, they’re trying to reach the millions of people searching on the keywords in the posts.

Ah so that's it. Keywords.

Another possibility is the phone numbers aren’t legit. I searched one and thought it matched up, but went back and realize it was the AI summary saying the number was “associated with” the company. That could mean that all the spam has convinced the AI that it’s the right number. So they’re leveraging the way AI is “trained“ - if you have a bazillion places saying 2+2=5, that’s going to eventually show up as a possible answer

You call the number and they try to get your account info

19 minutes ago, swansont said:

Another possibility is the phone numbers aren’t legit. I searched one and thought it matched up, but went back and realize it was the AI summary saying the number was “associated with” the company. That could mean that all the spam has convinced the AI that it’s the right number. So they’re leveraging the way AI is “trained“ - if you have a bazillion places saying 2+2=5, that’s going to eventually show up as a possible answer

You call the number and they try to get your account info

Now that would make a lot of sense. So the aim is to corrupt AI into feeding suckers scam phone numbers. Brilliant!

Most reports I have done in one period

I really pity the people that are driven to take such wretched boiler room jobs, many must know how noxious their presence is on the web. We had a pet go missing a few years back and the Craigslist ad was answered by some woman claiming to be a neighbor. It became clear she was a scammer (e.g. asking for us to send money to pay for her outlay on food and cat toys, before she brought the cat over), and I was able to track her actual location to someplace in Africa and flag her CList relay. I closed our exchange of emails by asking her how she lived with herself, preying on the hopes of people who had lost beloved pets. I didn't want her to starve, but I wanted to make her conscience twinge.

A bit OT, but I recently received an email titled Your Prostate is the size of a Lemon. Spammers seem to be able to garner some personal information (age, in this case) and then direct a torrent of scare ads (failing organs, in my demographic) your way. It's interesting that science fora OTOH seem to get a lot of spam tilted more towards a younger demog. Possibly many keywords on-site suggesting students and areas of study.

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

I really pity the people that are driven to take such wretched boiler room jobs, many must know how noxious their presence is on the web. We had a pet go missing a few years back and the Craigslist ad was answered by some woman claiming to be a neighbor. It became clear she was a scammer (e.g. asking for us to send money to pay for her outlay on food and cat toys, before she brought the cat over), and I was able to track her actual location to someplace in Africa and flag her CList relay. I closed our exchange of emails by asking her how she lived with herself, preying on the hopes of people who had lost beloved pets. I didn't want her to starve, but I wanted to make her conscience twinge.

A bit OT, but I recently received an email titled Your Prostate is the size of a Lemon. Spammers seem to be able to garner some personal information (age, in this case) and then direct a torrent of scare ads (failing organs, in my demographic) your way. It's interesting that science fora OTOH seem to get a lot of spam tilted more towards a younger demog. Possibly many keywords on-site suggesting students and areas of study.

How did you manage to track this scammer's location?

Why don't we rec@ notification when we report?

Bc only mods and admins are informed of reported posts and related actions. They enter s special permission group that standard members are not part of

6 hours ago, exchemist said:

How did you manage to track this scammer's location?

IIRC, she went off the Craigslist relay system (which anonymizes addresses) and I then checked her email address at a website that monitored and located scams. Been a while, so I don't recall the details. Just that she wasn't too bright, and didn't use some sort of cloaked server like Proton Mail.

Seems to have happened again with all these questions and contact info posts.

its probably a lot to ask of moderators, but maybe new members should not be allowed to post until they reply to a PM from Moderation after submitting an inquiry to join.
It would crack down on these 'drive-by' spam posts.

14 minutes ago, MigL said:

Seems to have happened again with all these questions and contact info posts.

its probably a lot to ask of moderators, but maybe new members should not be allowed to post until they reply to a PM from Moderation after submitting an inquiry to join.
It would crack down on these 'drive-by' spam posts.

Might take less time to do this than banning a bunch of accounts.

FYI, since we had an influx today, that the spam filters caught some, but not all, of the posts.

4 hours ago, swansont said:

FYI, since we had an influx today, that the spam filters caught some, but not all, of the posts.

I reported a few as they came through.

And then so many new accounts...

I feel sorry. A big thanks for keeping the forum as clean as possible.

Just for the record: Who is online:

Yes never seen a spam flood this bad. I would just delete the last three hours of new posts

There will be some blue on blue but once the spam has stopped and been deleted we can just repost

>500 flagged posts when I logged in 45 minures ago. Slowly spam-banning them, and those that didn’t get caught.

Plus they keep showing up every couple of minutes

Just curious: are all these acçounts from the same IP address?

18 minutes ago, Eise said:

Just curious: are all these acçounts from the same IP address?

No. Not even from the same location, or some are using a VPN to appear to be from somewhere else, though many were from India (though I only checked a small fraction of the posts)

I very much hope that this is not some script running. Otherwise it is, translated from a Dutch expression 'mopping with the tap open'. I hope you have some help.

Wouldn't it be possible for some time not to accept new members?

2 hours ago, swansont said:

>500 flagged posts when I logged in 45 minures ago. Slowly spam-banning them, and those that didn’t get caught.

Plus they keep showing up every couple of minutes

Spam ban thank you, man.

Could there be a slightly more challenging registration test? Questions that weed out more bots and still let people from various cultures and education levels in?

It's 753 MDT and there's a really thick cluster of spams from three hours ago. I can't scroll past them to find more legit overnight posts from all those nutty Limeys who get up so early.

3 hours ago, TheVat said:

those nutty Limeys who get up so early.

Does not look like there has been anything for six hours, at least nothing has got through.

4 hours ago, TheVat said:

those nutty Limeys who get up so early.

The sun gets up earlier for us because we're British.