Blogging can be fun, but it also has its dark sides. One of these are the continuous automated spam attacks, roughly 100+ per month on this website. I had finally managed to put a lid on the automated attacks by adding the captcha feature to my comments, you know the little image containing a code that only a human being can read. From the day I installed the captcha feature it very effectively filtered all automated spam attacks, and I felt at ease again. Reading and dismissing 100+ comments per month was annoying, to say it in the least. Now I can enjoy the valid comments made by regular people.

However, fool if you think it’s over… Just recently I read an article in one of the online newspapers about companies in India offering their service to circumvent captcha-enabled comment or contact forms. They hire human beings to log on to websites and manually enter their customers’ message.

I believe, that my website – like many, many others – is now a target of such services. Lately I keep receiving messages through this website’s contact form, and they all contain the same message:

“We are interested to increase traffic to your website, please get back to us in order to discuss the possibility in further detail.”

Besides the lack of an effective marketing message, there are several red flags popping up. Again, the plain message didn’t do anything to boost my confidence in the sender’s competence. The next warning sign is the e-mail address, usually a gmail account. There is nothing wrong with gmail, but professionals, especially those in the marketing business, do have e-mail addresses dedicated to their business. Last, but not least, my contact form also delivers additional information about the sender’s origination. The e-mails I receive come usually from… India.

As we all know there are programs at work that scan all websites on the world wide web, and some of them are designed to scrape e-mail addresses from website pages. These addresses are then stored in databases and sold to customers wanting to send out their spam. I will use their service in a reversed way by posting the e-mail addresses that offered to “increase traffic to my website.”

Spam the Spammers!

nathan.kyle013@gmail.com – Sent from (ip address): 122.161.93.160 - (ABTS-North-Dynamic-160.93.161.122.airtelbroadband.in)
charlesgatessss@gmail.com – Sent from (ip address): 122.163.117.163 - (ABTS-North-Dynamic-163.117.163.122.airtelbroadband.in)
melodiemarle33@gmail.com – Sent from (ip address): 122.163.145.110 - (ABTS-North-Dynamic-110.145.163.122.airtelbroadband.in)
bloomsoft16@gmail.com – Reverse DNS Authenticity : [Possibly Forged]

Let’s add some scammers as well:

support@webprofitclub.com
jonchannomvwvr@btconline.net
jonchanncloto@speedy.com.ar
jonchannqrdeu@intelnet.net.gt
info@trustedmailsender.com
office@sitebuildersnow.info
admin@sitebuildersnow.info