Spammer Marin

[Ralf]

Someone recommended reading this article to me. It's about the world's most prolific spammer who seems to choose random websites to broadcast his electronic litter. Or garbage, if you like.

What do you make of those people? I think some quotes taken from the article are somewhat chilling.

"I realize that what happened to me is nothing compared to stuff like the war in Iraq or the 9/11 attacks."

"But it really did serious damage to me and my business."

"As far as I'm concerned, spammers are nothing more than electronic home-invasion gangs."
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[Yankee]

Hi Ralf

I despise spammers, and I guess most people feel pretty much the same way.

We've got a new member here named (coincidentally?) "marin" who has been spending quite a bit of time on the forum for the past few days, but whose posts have all been identical to the posts from "marine" on this other site, for example:
ICT-in-Education

I can't help but wonder what this guy might be doing when he's logged in here!
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[Jan]

Hi,

Why has he picked up Poles? Is it not a bit depressing when some honest answer could turn into a long time problem. I guess he might have his reasons,for sure it is good investment to learn more about computers and internet.
I dare to say that the poor victim has not entirely lost his time fighting back because he prooved that it is possible to achive something even being alone and he had learned a lot additonaly about his working tool I mean internet.
Spaming is rather the begining of internet crime, further with time could be only worse and worse.
When I send any email to somebody in USA it is mostly pending in security box till the owner of the address would recognize it and would confirm the will to communicate with my email addres,States are much more advance as Europe in that matter.
I don't wish to have such a foe, it could be devastating.

Jan

[Ralf]

Hi everyone,

Do you know anything about spambots?

And do you think that specific guidelines regarding spam and advertising in posts would prevent members from spamming and touting?

Thanks for your ideas!
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[Yankee]

Hi Ralf

I seriously doubt that posting guidelines that address spamming could dissuade forum spambots from spamming the forum and registering as new "members". (Hopefully Slava will be able to deal with the flood of "lovely" new spam registrations that the spambots have been creating in the past couple of weeks, though.)

However, it seems to me that some specific guidelines about what cannot be posted would be beneficial. I think this would not only clarify things for some members, but would also help moderators in determining what is and is not permitted and what must/should/can be deleted. For example, I recall one link that was posted by a member here which I personally think should have been instantly deleted (pornographic), however the link remains. It would probably be useful to have guidelines about posting copyrighted material and also about posting links to illegally copied material. Can registered members advertise whatever they want, whenever they want in a forum post? Why shouldn't meaningless, multiple posts left by spambots be deleted?

In addition, it might not be a bad idea to make members aware of the risks of putting their e-mail addresses in a forum post. (They can always tell people to simply send a PM.)

Anyway, those are just a few of my thoughts about spam guidelines.

Meanwhile, I see that our new "buddy-bot" marin has been hard at work spamming all over the Internet. If you do a Google search for "My name is Ray, from Utica, NY." (which marin posted in three separate posts here), Google will tell you that, as of today, there are 33,000 instances of that sentence (along with the rest of the text) to be found on the Net.
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[Yankee]

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I've just discovered an old thread on the topic of spam. Here is the link:
http://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic1371.html#4451

In that thread, Torsten posted a list of keywords and keyword combinations containing the word spam. I wonder whether that list would look pretty much the same today, or whether there have been any significant changes in the past few years.
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[Lost_Soul]

[Yankee]

Hi Alex

If you google part of the "Ray-from-Utica" text, you'll find even more names being used. I wonder whether the deletion of 'marin' from this site caused the spambot to get pissed off and reregister here under an "assumed name"...
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