Sneaky Spammers

Akismet does a killer job filtering out the spam comments on Surfarama, but I do still scan the comments in the list for moderation to ensure no false positives, and also because sometimes I find something kinda interesting…like the spam comment Akismet just gobbled up where the spammer had simply linked to a user profile page on The Washington Times website:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/users/Tylenole/ (by all means click this, just don’t click on the ads on the page you land on)

I guess they’ve done this because a link to washingtontimes.com is less likely to be filtered as spam either automatically (until it gets finger printed by Akismet) or under manual review. Click on the link though and you can see that the spammer has cleverly hijacked that page using some javascript to redirect to the real place he wanted to send you over at ipafeed.com where they have loads of ad links for various drugs. [UPDATE: This has been fixed so the page no longer redirects]

According to Compete their spammy tactics are reasonably effective too with 30-40k visitors per month.

I guess the lesson is to be careful what you let users do with your profile pages if you run a aite with membership. Unfortunately for the Washington Times this reflects badly on them and now their domain is probably implicated as a spam site by services like Akismet which finger print dodgy links in blog comments.

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UPDATE: Good on them…looks like the Washington Times have fixed it to remove the javascript redirect from the spammers profile page.