Spam Updates: 66.197.241.12, 173.1.61.66 and mikesmoneysite.com
Filed under: How-to, Ranting, Software, Spam, Technology, Websites
Spam, spam, spam. Gotta hate it all sometimes. I logged in today and saw “10 new comments”! I was ecstatic. Though, I look a little bit down the page and see “10 new spam comments” … dammit! Sure I had 10 new comments, but all spam. Great. This spam problem is only getting worse and worse it seems. Since my last post about spam, there has been a small wave of spam. This blog isn’t exactly big but it get’s its fair share of spam. I can only imagine how much spam the big blogs get. I feel sorry for them.
Today’s spam report is about three new jerks to watch out for. The first and most annoying, in my opinion, is Mike’s Money Site. I’m not going to like to it directly because I do not want to give the guy any more traffic than he’s already getting. `Mike’ has set up a automatic blog comment spam program which I have to admit is a pretty darn good idea, as much as I don’t like it. What it does is post a short and kind comment, though rather generic at times. Also he uses decently well crafted text as it tells the blog owner things like: your post was informative, good post, “Cool post, just subscribed.” Things like that make a person wanna not believe it’s a spam comment, sadly it is.
Now the very interesting part which uses some good social engineering and psycology. The comments all ’seem’ to come from a real person. They have a real name, they have a gmail mail account, there is a person’s picture that comes with the comment and the link goes to a real site! All very convincing right? Well, if you follow the link you get to Mike’s page. Which, in essence, is a sales page (though pretty crappy for a marketting sales page). On the page is tells people that by getting the seemingly “free” e-book they can easily make $1,000 USD a week just like he did by working only 10 hours. Yeah well … B.S. Maybe it actually works, maybe it doesn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that the comment is spam. His site makes promises using some rather decent sales silver tongue language:
- Sign up for the right programs and don’t fall for scams. Google Cash Secret is absolutely free, has been featured on ABC and CNN, and will teach you to work with the most reputable company online, Google. This program is the ONLY official ways to make money posting links on Google- don’t fall for imitators!
- Instead of working harder, work smarter. The Google Cash Secret kit has everything you need to increase your earnings without spending more time working.
- Save your free time. Remember, you can make $5,000 a month or more working part time. I made $5,000 working only 10 hours, and you can too. So, after you get your Google Cash Secret kit, be sure to set aside some time to spend with your loved ones- you’ll have plenty of time to work, but the whole point of having more money is to have more free time.
He even warns (which I found very amusing):
Let me tell you, there are a lot of scams and lies out there about how to work on the Internet! There are sites out there that will promise you hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a day for doing absolutely nothing. Well, if there’s one thing my dad taught me, it’s that you don’t get something for nothing. Of course, these companies will often charge you hundreds of dollars for the privilege of working with them. So don’t fall for the scams!. I knew that if I really wanted to make money online, I had to work for a reputable online company that wouldn’t rip me off.
Right, well. His offer of ‘free’ did sound interesting so I went to investage his free “offer”. I clicked his link and a very interesting page popped it. “Error 403: Invalid Country”. Say what? Invalid country? Last time I checked, all countries on this planet were legal, albiet some better than others though still legit. And if you are wondering, no I am currently not in a 1st world huge country like the USA, Canada or any ‘rich’ EU country. So if this was a legit site, why would it have something like “invalid country”? What kind of legit website does that? Just doesn’t make sense. (Note: There are good reasons to block some countries access to your site. Could be for security reasons, or you want only regional access to your site, or one of a plethora of other reasons). A sales site like that should not be limited like that.
Next time I looked at was the actual link. Another interesting thing, it’s a affiliate link! HA! And all is now known. I didn’t stop there though. I wanted to see if I could find some more information about this looser who was spamming us. His website WHOIS information releaves not much, sadly. As he is using a WHOIS protection service (which by the way is recommended for some sites, depending on what you are doing. Personal sites are a good place to have a whois protection service turned on.) Though, the service cannot block all the information. His site(s) is hosted at a host called Rat Host, hmm … fitting name. They seem like a decent host, never heard of them though. One point to note though, is that their logo character IS, not is like .. IS the character from Ratatouille the movie. Kinda sad, hope they have a liscense to use it.
Here is a quick list of how Mike’s spam method works:
- Setup a legit looking sales site. Small, simple, and clean. Something that really seems to offer a great deal of information for free.
- Run the spam program to spam legit looking spam comments on good blogs
- Have the comments link back to the spam sales site using very legit looking comments
- Have sales site promise great things and link people to a affiliate sale.
Rather underhanded yet smart at the same time. Though, the idiot made the mistake of making his things ‘too’ perfect so to say and repeated the same things too many times from the same IP. tsk tsk tsk.
Next we have spam information from the two IP addresses: 66.197.241.12 and 173.1.61.66.
Sphere: Related ContentNew Wave Of Spam From ds4ns1ns2.cn (89.28.14.35). Blogger Beware!
Photo from Brett's Site http://brettduncan.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/blog-spam-crock-or-compliment/
Spam is a ever hated beast in this world. It is the prostitution of all that is good on the internet. Worse than a cockroach and sticks more than a garbage dump. Just like anything evil in this world, the more you try to kill it the stronger it rebounds. Fear not though, there are way to get around many of our spam problems.
For e-mail, there are solutions like Gmail with built in social-spam-detection, as I call it, Bogofilter, Spam Assassin, Razor and many more for e-mail. For Word Press blogs we have the almighty collaborative spam detection plugin: Akismet.
Blog’s have been riddled with spam from all sorts since the beginning and I highly doubt that we will see an end to it anytime soon, but we can fight it. Akisment currently stands at the #1 WordPress commend spam solution. It is free for personal use. Free as in beer, and just as tasty. If you run a WP blog, you will almost certainly need Akismet unless you want a spam LolZ cat “inside youz Blog, spammin joo commentz”.Though, lately things have been changing it seems.
Spammers aren’t dumb, they spam for a reason. It profits them in one way or another, thus they keep doing it. Or they simply way to disrupt systems, annoy the crap out of people or get revenge … who knows. So, why I am I already telling you something you already know? Because ‘they’ are changing tactics, and they are doing it fast.
A little while ago I recieved a comment from a “Andrew Boldman” who seemed like a nice person. Let me a rather nice comment saying “I really liked this post. Can I copy it to my site? Thank you in advance.” Honestly, I was estatic that someone commented and wanted to use some of my content. I threw a ceromony, threw a party and almost made a press release. And then another comment soon after from “Kelly Brown” saying how much she “really like[d] [my] post”. By the Gods! I have commenters. I was on my way to success … or so I thought.
Soon I received another comment, and then another. And I began to ask … huh, why all of a sudden? As I looked over the comments I noticed something strange, all of the e-mail addressed ended with “ds4ns1ns2.cn”. Well that’s a little bit strange, maybe a firewalled area where they all have to send out using one service? Seems just a teebit odd. I checked the IP … all from the same IP: 89.28.14.35.
And that’s when I knew it … it was spam. All these nice comments and spam. So, where is this comming from and why? Several ideas flow around but one rather good theory goes like this, as stated well by Mark Brain on the Warrior Forum. He said:
It’s possible that they are testing sites which will accept spam or those without moderators to control the spam. After that they will have a list of the sites that are “spam havens” then begin posting the actual links.
A simple google search for “ds4ns1ns2.cn” reveals a plethora of spam details about this. The first page results are loaded with spam complains and details from these people:
