A Day in Paradise

Oh boy, this is going to be good!

I can put your site at the top of a search engines listings. This is no joke and I can show proven results
from all our past clients. If this is something you might be interested in, send me a reply with the web
addresses you want to promote and the best way to contact you with some options.

Thanks in advance,

Michael Leighton
1st In Line Optimizations

Ha! You can put me on top of the search engine listings? No, sir… I can put YOU and the rest of your fuggin spammers on top of the search engine listings!

Muahahahahhaaaaaa

At least this spam explains how these guys get my email address.

Greetings in the name of the Lord,

I am Bishop Andrew Wright. Before I contacted you, I fasted and prayed over it. It was through God guidance I was able to contact you.

Right now as I am writing to you I am in hiding because of the past leaders in my country hunting for my life. They pushed away through me $50m (Fifty million United States Dollars) cash which I kept in a bank in Italy.

What I want you to do is securing this fund and distribute it to charity because as I man of God I should not have involved myself in this type of mess. I am doing this so that I can once again find favor in the sight of God because I have really sinned against him. I should have not been involved in stealing from the treasury of my country.

As soon as I receive your favorable reply, I would then direct you to a consultant who would assist you with the security code that I am going to give you. Please do furnish me with your telephone numbers so that I can be able to talk to you and give you more details.

I am waiting for your urgent response.

Finally the success of this project depends to a great extent you’re keeping it secret between you and I and your confidentiality in this transaction.

Please reply me to my private email address biandrewXXX@hotmail.com

God bless you.
Bishop Andrew Wright.

Steve Eley coined a new phrase on his popular SciFi podcast magazine EscapePod.

“Webfungus” is a his term for Link Farms otherwise known as Search Engine Spam.

Now I have a question. If there were a magazine which sent people from shop to shop to gathered information, then they chose, based on the information they gathered, which shop they would feature for free in their advertising section, who would be resposible if “bad shops” got listed in the advertising section?

Your site is your castle. I have the right to make whatever kind of site I want. Just because you click on my site through a third party website, how am I to blame. That is Google’s fault.

Not only does Google offer free advertising through their search engine, but they also a simple way to monetize the system.

So not only do you have a magazine that will give free advertising to anyone, but also a complete business model through which you can make serious money through the system.

Google is entirely responsible for the problems with the system. If you don’t like the results that you get back from your searches, then choose another search engine. Google is certainly making money from the system, and the “webfungi” are probably making more money than we are.

The only people who are getting screwed are us and the advertisers.

Now I’ve been to 3 christmas markets so far, and already have a christmas tree up, but there’s nothing like a piece of spam which brings the spirit of chirstmas right into your mail folder.

Merry Christmas from our F*cking Spammer friends!

Another fun bit of spam… well at least he doesn’t say that absolute secrecy is important

My name is Alter Wolfgang. I am a senior partner in the firm. This investigation involves a client who shares the same surname with you and also the circumstances surrounding investments made by this client at Deutsche Bank AG.

The Deutsche Bank AG Banking client died intestate and nominated no successor in title over the investments made with the Bank. The essence of this communication with you is to request you provide us information/comments on any  or all of the four issues:

1-Are you aware of any relative/relation who shares your same surname whose last known contact address was Hamburg, Germany?

2-Are you aware of any investment of considerable value made by such aperson at the Deutsche Bank AG? 3-Born on the 1st of June 1927

4-Can you establish beyond reasonable doubt your eligibility to assume status of successor in title to the deceased?

It is pertinent that you inform us ASAP whether or not you are familiar with this personality that we may put an end to this communication with you and our inquiries surrounding this personality. You must appreciate that we are constrained from providing you with more detailed information at this point.

Please respond to this mail as soon as possible to afford us the opportunity to close this investigation.

Thank you for accommodating our enquiry.

blue123silver@netscape.net
Wolfgang Alter

Now I’m not writing this because I’m bored, and I’m not writing this in anger because of the 2792 blog spams that accumulated over night, or the 197 blog spams which I have been hit with since I last hit the delete button (about an hour ago). I’m writing this because spammers are evil and deserve a slow and painful death, and the least I can do is steal the top spot on google.

So our winners for today’s spammer of the day award is is Digimode.co.uk.

From strategy to execution, we have the capabilities to provide our customers with seamless, one-stop solutions. Be it getting closer to your customers or getting products to market, we address the entire spectrum of technology needs.

No word in the email or their website about their spamming services… I guess you have to find that out yourselves. Maybe next time they’ll see that spamming (me at least) causes more trouble than it’s worth.

Well, at least they will when I come up first in google for Elephant Finder. It is not that bad a site, but it really sucks that they decided to resort to spamming as a marketing tool.

Especially for a niche market, the only place spamming will get you is in the can! Sorry!

MSN Block Checker works on AOL & Yahoo also

NOTE: there are instructions for removing this below. If after using the tool it still exists them comment with information about what is happening and I will try to help.

Here is a tool which may help with the removal. Use at your own risk!

This peice of software is a real class act by yet another f*cking spammers. You install it thinking that you will be able to see who is blocking you in MSN, and I guess you have to give it your MSN username and password, and it hooks itself into your MSN so that it sends a message to everyone you chat with advertising itself.

Very sneaky! The “feature” is explained in the help page “Block Checker has a powerful fun feature to tell your friends about Block Checker without the headache of telling EACH friend about it. This is how we let other people know about our application. If you wish to remove this function from our software you can do so by downloading this tool (if in the event our uninstaller doesn’t work use this to remove it) .”

Update by: LifeDrain

LifeDrain gave the following input in a comment, I’m posting it here for anyone else who might find this page. Thanks LifeDrain!

You don’t need to download anything to get rid of it. First, log off MSN and go to Start > Control Panel> Add/Remove Programs and look to see if there are any BlockChecker progs to be removed. If so, Remove those and proceed to the next step. If not, just move on. Next, go to whatever drive ur program files folder is located on (most ppl use C: drive) so C: > Program Files >Block Checker and manually delete all of the files inside that folder except the one with the little MSN person icon because that one will give you access denied. After doing this, go to your Start button, click RUN and type in regedt32 then hit OK. When the box pops up, BE VERY CAREFUL HERE cuz screwing with ur registry can bork ur whole machine if you don’t know what ur doing. Navigate your way to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE >SOFTWARE >Microsoft >Windows >CurrentVersion >Run and delete the Block-Checker reg key there (and anything else that says Block Checker ONLY on it). Close out of that and reboot your machine. Now, make your way back to C: > Program Files and delete the Block-Checker Folder still listed there. Empty your Recycling Bin and reboot one final time and that nasty Block-Checker should be gone.

If you successfully removed it, you should now consider going to http://www.grisoft.com and downloading AVG Anti-Virus FREE version by clicking on their site-map and clicking AVG Free and to http://www.lavasoftuse.com and downloading Ad-Aware SE. Run both of these regularly to keep spyware and viruses to a minimum. Another tip, don’t be such a cybernoob and stop downloading shit for MSN Messenger becuz it’s all ad infested crap that doesn’t do anything but infect your PC and the PCs of your idiot friends who read ur spam and DL it too… if you can’t keep your PC free from this crap you shouldn’t own a computer.Good Luck and Have a nice day!

Update:

As far as I can see the file crss.exe does not have anything to do with this problem. the CRSS.exe file is part of a virus called “W32.AGOBOT.GH“. Get a decent virus scanner to protect yourself.

OK, here we go, Razorskins just got themselves a place in my “F*cking Spammers” category. They aren’t spamming anyone (that I know of), but have a ripped off one of my good friend Dan’s fantastic Squirrelmail theme and is selling it on his site as his own.

The kicker is their lame-ass disclaimer “We apologize for the low quality images on the screen shots but it helps cut down on those who wish to pirate our developments.” Yeh, they seem to know all about that.

The lesson to be learnt from this, is that if you’re going to rip of someone, don’t buy it from them first using your company name, and then sell it again at the same company. I think I’ll add this to my Village Idiots category as well.

Thankfully, Dan has updated his stuff and his site with a fresh new look… so I guess Razorskins will need to buy the new version so that they can update their pirate copy

Note: Since the time this blog entry was written many great changes have been made to the iGrep search engine. The amount of ads have been greatly reduced, the archives are no longer searching and I believe iGrep is a useful too for searching the content on the devshed network. Read the following comment and the discussion that follows with that in mind.

Devshed is reproducing hundreds of thousands of mailing list and usenet posts which are marked as their “archives” but exist for the sole purpose of generating ad revenue when people stumble onto them. This is their business plan, and the purpose of iGrep. This is internet and search engine spam, and I pity anyone who lands on their pages or thinks that using their search will help answer any questions that they have. iGrep offers NOTHING that is not already in google but by duplicating content (violating googles guidlines) they are making content even more difficult to find. I can’t even open one of their archived pages without my browser grinding to a halt while trying to display all of their silly flash ads.

Google adsense policies clearly states that:

No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant.

Please convince me that this page has another purpose.

Nobody wins with this type of spam, the advertisers don’t win, Internet users don’t win, and unless the promoters get hard cold cash they don’t gain anything either. The only people hoping to gain anything are the spammers themselves.

Why respectable companies, and decent people associate and represent a company that does this, I don’t know.

I’m getting really tired of sites which are aggregating aggregators, just to generate content for their own site and spamming the internet with copyrighted content.

Artima is borderline, they grab the content of your feed and put it in their “forums”, put google ads on your content, without even the decency to host images themselves. At least you sign up and allow them to do it.

I just bumped into this post on Livejournal and it prompted this complaint.

My (non-lj) blog entries are being hosted on LJ via the syndicated planet_php Feed.

I allow planet-php.net to syndicate my content, as part of their front page news, but cannot allow a third party site to create individual pages which contain nothing other than the content from my blog.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/planet_php/23541.html

I understand that you may be syndicating the content for your users ease-of-use and if this is the case then add appropriate meta tags to prevent my content being listed on google and other search engines.

Aaron Wormus

… to get into our mail box

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I really hope someone buys this stuff! Or maybe I don’t… either way, these guys certainly get an E for effort!

Waxy.org: Daily Log: Wordpress Website’s Search Engine Spam

What bothers me the most about this is the hypocritical stand that the wordpress team took when they hardcoded the rel=nofollow into wordpress. With one hand they block links which most of the time are properly used, and with the other they spam search engines.

Well… they’ve been added to my F*cking spammers category and been banned from google (going from 8/10 to 0/10), so I think that’s enough punishment for one site… let’s kiss, make up and get along with our lives.

I’m very happy that google has smacked this down and hope that they punish all sites that do this with equally severe punishments.

What%u2019s the Story? %u2014 By Aaron Wormus � F*cking Spammers

Chinese Spammers have class, at least they are somewhat honest about sending from a fake address:
(more…)

The Last Craft? Marcus’ blog on Agile Web Development » How did Google get it wrong?

I posted this as a comment, but am adding it here, for my own reference.

—

Any scheme that allows the owners of the website to give information to google opens google up for abuse. Which is the one reason I am opposed to the rel=nofollow scheme.

The “blog effect” took google by surprise and skewed PR in a way that those who designed it hadn’t anticipated. I think this scheme is a veiled attempt to lessen the effect that all the linking within blogs has on PR system. If all blogs used rel=nofollow for trackbacks and comments links, then blogs in general would have far less PR, which would filter back through the internet giving non-blogs a better chance of being noticed.

To solve the spam problem, I would propose a penalty for sites that gain more than a certain number of backlinks within an alotted time period. This will obviously effect other non-spamming sites, but I think it would be safe to say that just because 10,000 bloggers link to the funny-page-of-the-day, doesn’t make that page any more important in the bigger scope of things.

Of course that is also abusable, as I can very quickly put an end to a competitors legitimate link building campaign by spamming using his URL. Which puts us back at square one.