A while ago, I wrote about an alleged school for medical
assistants that had unleashed a massive spam attack on my blog. For a while,
the spam kept coming even after I posted my investigative report blog about the
inadequacies of the school.
They finally gave up, but other spammers persist. I have
noticed a common thread which is that spammers are either illiterate, careless or
maybe both.
I thought you might enjoy some of the spam that I've blocked
from appearing in the comments section of my posts. I have omitted the many links
to their websites, but otherwise have not altered the text at all.
Here goes. Some must be read aloud for maximum effect. The comments are in italics. [My
thoughts are in brackets.]
You might post on the templates for the blog. You should
reveal it's extraordinary. Your blog research might grow your pocket book.
You done certain good points there. I did a search on the
subject and found nearly all persons will agree with your blog.
Тhank you for the good writeup. It іn fact ωaѕ a amusement
аcсοunt іt. Looκ advanсed to faг аddeԁ аgreеable frоm yοu! By the wаy, how саn
ωe cоmmunicаtе? [Ah … we can't.]
Thanks for the post. Inquisitive if you'd mind discussing
your opinions on laparoscopic herniation repairs, and whether or not it's a
worthy exercise? Colon and body part surgeries take issue with respect to
incidence and risk factors for developing incisional SSI. SSI police
investigation for such surgeries ought to be performed one by one, as this
could result in a lot of economical identification of risk factors and a
discount in SSI. [The "SSI police"? That might not be so farfetched.]
The abysmal you dig into the content and communicate us the
precise aggregation is appreciable. [That's easy for you to say.]
It's great entry, you have some awesome characters, looks
very good! It's a good things for me! i will fllow with interest your post.
Good Lucky!
I w ould like to give you a thanks for your helpful post.
Definitely I believe that this post is very important. I also believe that the
bellow link is also very important. [From a bankruptcy attorney in
California. It makes you want to hire him, doesn't it?]
Hey!!! Nice Information which you are mentioned under the
category of health. I am really really appreciated. Very great Stuff you are
mentioned about cardiology and other elements related to health. please keep it
up. you can also visit our links which is also relates to health. Our
specialization in various types of cardiology, bypass surgery, open heart
surgery etc. etc. for further information please visit our site today.
Survey is a method of gathering data form the common people
about a thing. It provides the correct idea about the things. It will really
help a lot of people. I shared it with my friends on Facebook and Twitter.
Thanks admin for this post. [This is from a company that does surveys. No
thanks.]
Your blog is very informative and gracefully. Your guideline
is very good. [Gracefully indeed.]
You might hear it referred medical Autoclave to as a “jet
bridge,” because the manufacturer specializes in building jet bridges for
airports. [Funny, I've been in surgery a long time, and yet I've never heard an
autoclave called a jet bridge.]
10 comments:
The consensus seems to be that the bad grammar is purposeful: (tl/dr: The spammers seek people gullible enough to complete the transaction, not just click through).
DANIEL SIMONS: The interesting insight is that what the spammers need to do is filter out people who aren’t gullible enough. They need to filter out the people who might respond but wouldn’t in the end send them any money.
[BROOKE LAUGHS]
It takes the scammers quite a bit of time and effort to reel in the suckers. They have to send repeated emails, they have to prolong the scam, making them become more and more comfortable with the idea of wiring large amounts of money to them and try and limit their time and effort to those people who are most likely to give them money, so, one of the best ways to do that is to make the scam obvious enough that anybody who has any ounce of skepticism won’t participate.
Signal detection originally was applied to hearing, right? So can you detect that very faint beep when you go for a hearing test? If your hearing were perfect, you’d say, “Yeah, I heard the beep” every time there was a beep, and you’d say, “No, there was no beep” every time there wasn’t a beep. But it turns out we tend to sometimes think that something is present when it’s not, and we sometimes miss something when it’s actually there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so, in the case of these scammers –
DANIEL SIMONS: The gullible people are the beeps, right? And all the people who respond but never send them money - they’re the absence of a beep that they think is a beep. They don’t care about beeps that they don’t hear because they can send out millions of emails, and if they miss a few targets, so what. What they want to make sure they do is eliminate those cases where they think they’ve got a sucker and they don’t.
http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/aug/31/why-nigerian-email-scams-work/transcript/
See also:
http://www.quora.com/Scams/Why-are-email-scams-written-in-broken-English
Thank you for your insightful explanation. Unlike the spam comments, it makes a lot of sense.
However, since these are comments on a blog post, it's hard to see how a scam would be effective. It has to get by me (not likely), and then the website has to be viewed by someone who would copy and paste the link into their browser (possibly more likely, but I doubt it as my readers tend to be doctors, nurses, med students and informed lay people).
I've recently had these people start showing up on my site as well. Annoying! I'm not sure if you have ever listened to Planet Money on NPR before but they just happened to do a piece on why these spammers do this. It has to do with how Google indexes sites. Basically the more links to your site from outside sources the higher you will be ranked and if the link happens to be from a popular site such as yours they will be ranked even higher. So when they leave these links it is not in hopes that you or your readers will click on them. They are just hoping Google will see them!
Survivor DO
Survivor, thanks for the comments. So what you are saying is that the presence of links alone on my site without anyone even clicking on them will increase the chances of their site being ranked higher by Google? I have had some spam comments with 10 or more links in them. Now it makes sense.
Of course, that strategy fails if the spammer's link and spam comment isn't posted.
Thanks for the humor!
KBD
KBD, my pleasure. I felt that I had to share.
Some of those posts seem to have been put through a language translator. I have gotten e-mail requests, in similar challenged English, for money to be wired to a Nigerian bank.
Emily
I received a very creative bit of spam on this post last night. I didn't allow the comment but here it is with the link removed.
"They finally gave up, but other spammers persist. I have noticed a www.___.com thread which is that spammers are either illiterate, careless or maybe both."
The link goes to a commercial website.
Pretty sure these comments are created by some Markov Chain spam software, not penned by humans.
That might be true but see my comment just above yours. Do you really think that was not done by a human? A quote was taken directly from the post and inserted into the comment.
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