The rise of SPAM

The site seems to be getting more attention from SPAM operators. I got a message sent to a group I'm in from a 'R*se Albert' to "Just complete our surv*y and take part in our pr*motion campaign to receive your K**** retail card." with a link in the email from Mohawk's Rock to some site outside.

This is a particularly bad form of spam, because the link is directly sent to your email and will likely take you to another webpage that will try and install malware on your PC.

One thing I noticed, for anyone who has made a Group, you can untick the option to let people send a message to everyone in the Group - this would stop the spam like we got recently from 'R*se Albert'

'Hilary B*cker' was one of the first false accounts that spammed nearly everyone a few months ago, there was another I think that got deleted, and now we have 'R*se Albert' - both in the last few weeks.

I came across a blog from Google warning how leaving these spam accounts and their spam messages on a social networking site can lead to search engines losing trust in the site. (Probably would reduce the sites ranking in their results so it appears lower down.)

They explain why spam is targetting us on both big and small social networking sites:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/spam20-fake-user...

I hope you will help fight this tide of spam, by deleting it from comments (click X at right of them on your profile comments). And for owners of Groups, edit them to prevent members sending messages to the whole group.

Also, discuss other ways to help stop them here and protect folk from spam, viruses and phishing here.
Any questions or worries about this, feel free to ask here too!

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Giant Mohawk Man on May 4, 2010 at 2:43am

Mariela Tyree has been banished!

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Permalink Reply by Kobalos on July 9, 2010 at 2:44pm

A new spammer to ignore is using the old 'contact by email to see pic' trick to get your email address so they can send you MOAR spam! Yay!

So, please ignore: joydesm*nd_221, if they left their standard comment that they've sent to loads of us, just delete it.