« | Home | »

Clever Spam

By Glen McNamee | October 28, 2009

Last week I received the follow comment on one my C64 related blog posts

Spam Capture

Akismet has flagged it up as spam, but when I looked it I found the comment was on topic (the C64 being old school and 80s) the user had a gravitar and reasonable looking email address, so I was tempted to flag this comment as not being spam, but I decided to a little investigation first.

Searching for Britney Bennett on the internet found a Flickr account, on-topic blog comments on moelane.com, deepcapture and simonblog which all look real enough.

Looking at the linked website http://www.britneybennett.com/ it gives big clues about the intent of these blog posts. Lots of pictures of a pretty girl and then some links to the extremely dodgy dating site fling.com

The final nail in the confin for poor Britney Spammett is the IP address used to post 24.10.128.14 is a well known spammer address, and may be the only reason with Akismet spotted it as being spam.

Research this, I found a similar comment spammer Mandy Corvo who has more blog comments. The website used this time is http://www.mandycorvo.com/ which again links to fling.com. This account also uses the following twitter account http://twitter.com/mandycorvo.

Sadly it looks like the war against spam just escalated again.

Topics: Blogging | 6 Comments »

6 Responses to “Clever Spam”

  1. dan Says:
    October 28th, 2009 at 6:03 pm

    No way – you’ve got me looking now!

  2. Griff Says:
    October 28th, 2009 at 6:03 pm

    My companies blog has had the exact same thing, we traced it to a xxx marketing company.

    One presumes they are paying people to crawl for blogs and leave slightly on-topic comments while linking back to their dodgy content.

    There’s no substitute for manual moderation!

  3. Noscere Says:
    October 29th, 2009 at 9:54 am

    I have had a few like this as well, luckely not on my blog (that I am aware of) but I do keep getting these trying to follow me on twitter. As usual they get blocked but I found the big clue is on their twitter they are following about X thousand people and have only made one twitter which has a link in it.

  4. Scribbler Says:
    October 30th, 2009 at 4:42 am

    I’m always wary about new commenteers on my site if I don’t know who they’re from. If I suspect they’re a spammer, I just edit the post and remove their URL. Therefore if they are a spammer, I’ve neutralised it.

  5. Optimus prime Says:
    October 31st, 2009 at 6:51 am

    Glen you are such a hero for catching this vile piece of scum!

  6. john costello Says:
    November 18th, 2009 at 8:05 am

    this came up in the 3 or 4th page result in google came across the girl in photo on facebook and thought i know that face i haave her bookmarked on flickr under 2 diffrent names will block them all now cheers c64

Leave a Reply