Flood of Spam after FS here

[Benjamin Marks]

Hello all:

After two spam-free years at my e-mail address, I have received three fraudulent Nigerian-I-would-gladly-pay-you-tooosday-through-my-shipping-agent type-responses to a FS ad that I placed here about a month ago. In fact, most of the gear I posted FS has been sold to list members.

I returned from Thanksgiving holiday to about 300 spam messages and several of the aforementioned responses to my (now old) ad. These responses are mostly comical, but I wondered whether anyone else has had a similar experience?

Ben Marks

 

[back alley]

thankfully, no.

 

[Frank Granovski]

I receive about 10 such spams per day, ever since I started posting at p.nut. Now that I don't post there any more, the spams have not stopped. 😛

 

[George S.]

I've had them and I believed they came from posting at PNet and definitely after an eBay transaction, but I never made a connection to anything I posted here. Are you sure you didn't post it anyplace else?

Lately, after everything i do on eBay, I get a few of those fraudulent messages that say they're ebay asking me to update my account info.

 

[ed1k]

Oh hell, sweet spam... sweet corn... seedless watermelons and such. I don't know what is FS but if you don't want spam do not post your email address anywhere, otherwise you will get some spam. I have my home page, it's very private and there is no "mailto" link on that page (so visitors have to cut'n'paste, not just click and send), anyway spammers send me a lot of emails which I do not respond at all, at least some of them think that email is not valid or not checked. If you respond that means you check your mail, so you're willing to buy viagra or enlarge your pennis . Abuse of internet is more general subject than RFF, sorry if I didn't help. I'm new to RFF and didn't get RFF related spam yet. These people don't look like spammers to me, but you have to be aware that everyone can read this forum.

Eduard.

 

[raid]

Oh boy. I hope I won't get as much spam.

 

[peter_n]

Never place your email address in a contiguous string on a forum page or in straight HTML on a web page. You are just asling for trouble.

 

[back alley]

ever check out the 'current activity' link on the home page here, where it says the number of members and guests currently on the forum?

the guests almost always outnumber the members and my guess is that many of those guests are robots mining for info.

we can't win - just try to keep them at bay. (no pun intended)

joe

 

[Frank Granovski]

As of right now, 43 members and 70 "guests." 😀

 

[Goodyear]

Never place your email address in a contiguous string on a forum page or in straight HTML on a web page. You are just asling for trouble.

What he said.

Spammers have bots that crawl web pages harvesting email addresses to target.

A little bit of obfuscation can help a lot. eg:

me AT mydomain DOT com
me@REMOVETHISmydomain.ANDTHISTOOcom
m e AT m y d o m a i n DOT c o m

Use your imagination 😀

 

[XAos]

What they said - if posting a for sale here, take advantage of the board's private message feature. If I say "contact bob@spambucket.net" in the text, bob is gonna get some email (sorry bob). But the best way to deal with spam is with bayesian filtering, and there are tons of products out that do it now. As in life, the best ones are free. Thunderbird does a marvelous job, There are plugins for Eudora and that MS email client you shouldn't be running anyway if you want to keep your computer secure. They work by associating words in the spam with words in messages previously marked as spam. And they work VERY well - I get 1 or 2 messages a week that the filters dont catch now.

 

[ducttape]

What he said.

Spammers have bots that crawl web pages harvesting email addresses to target.

A little bit of obfuscation can help a lot. eg:

me AT mydomain DOT com
me@REMOVETHISmydomain.ANDTHISTOOcom
m e AT m y d o m a i n DOT c o m

Use your imagination 😀

Nice going Mark...

Now the poor guy at me@REMOVETHISmydomain.ANDTHISTOOcom Is going to get flooded with offers to help a poor Nigerian government official resuce an unclaimed estate of 17.5 million dollars.

Every now and again I give a minutes thought to tossing in the towel and becoming a Nigerian scam artist. I mean, it MUTS pay for some of them, and 17.5 million is a LOT of dollars 😀

 

[XAos]

http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/
"The Nigerian Scam is, according to published reports, the Third to Fifth largest industry in Nigeria." But it appears that certain sections of the nigerian govt are in on the deal (the above website isn't so direct though) and they don't like others horning in on their game.

 

[Benjamin Marks]

Actually, I never publish my e-mail address with the "@" symbol. I had to abandon an AOL address three years ago after the spam-to-email ratio was over 200:1 precisely for this reason. No, the disturbing thing to me about the current flood is that it seems to have occurred _in spite of_ my posting an e-mail address with the salient features removed. Maybe the 'bots, spiders and other address gathering denizens have turned it up a notch in terms of sophistication.

 

[pbjbike]

A buddy of mine,(who's never bought or sold anything on the web), listed a really nice mountain bike on a cycling site with his full email address. I posted pics of the bike for him. Within hours he had a Russian buyer ready to send the obligatory surplus amount of money, (return the balance, yada yada), and my friend was exstatic! It took about 20 minutes of talking to convice him of the obvious scam. He was incrdulous at first, and hated to lose the "sale" but emailed the "buyer" back and cancelled the "deal"--He'd already sent his home address, and for a few wekks wondered weather or not someone would actually show to pick up the bike. He grew up a little that day ;-0.