It never takes long for the spammers to find you. Within days of opening this blog, we began receiving the first spam comments –the typical “buy this product”, “click this link” type that you also receive in your email.
But last week I encountered a new type of comment spam that almost slipped past me –it was a positive comment, no products mentioned, from a legitimate sounding name and email address, with no links to any strange websites.
After encountering enough scams, however, you develop a kind of sixth sense out of pure defensiveness. I did a google search on the name, and found that the same person had posted nearly identical comments in thousands of blogs on the same day –suggesting it was a robot and not a real person. But the question was why?
My best guess is this –once the original round of robot comments go out, the spammer can do a websearch on his alias to find out which forums approved his message. He can then concentrate his next round of spam –the kind carrying the payload –on the most vulnerable sites.
I don’t want to mention the exact names and messages here for that very reason, but if you want to find out more about this, there’s a blog entry from another blogger who was hit last week here.