Oooh... fun with scams

Okay--so... I get phoned... out of the blue. Apparently somebody wanted to offer me a free Solo Bell Cell Phone. Not certain if it was legit, and figuring it was mostly a scam, I bite. That is, until there was an sensitive data that would need to be released.

Now, the signal on the other end was... horrible. There was sound artifacts, there was compression quirbles--it was a bad signal. Maybe my phone was just dying--I doubted it... but well, maybe it was.

They gave a really really long list of features that the free phone, with no activation fee, no shipping and handling would have--should I pay a monthly fee of thirty Canadian Dollars.

Now, okay--maybe I can have good things. I figured, lets just see where this goes. He tells me, that his supervisor would have to get to me--so just wait five minutes until he phones back.

Kind of funny behaviour from a Telco like Solo Mobility? One under that whole Bell Umbrella. Yes, I have had issues with them in the past... but this is on the same level as "Uncle Pete's Backshed Telecommunications".

So, I pretty much get phoned back right after the whole hang up. I barely had put the phone down.

I give them my name "Kat Payne" and my home address... and yes, this phone is a good way to get a hold of me.

Then they needed one more thing... my Social Insurance Number.

I answered that I was not prepared to give that over the phone.

He assured me that it was a secure connection, and that my SIN would be used to generate my unique account id--we will not go into everything that is wrong with that...

I told him, that I only had his word for that.

"But Bell would never do that sort of thing to their customers."

"I only have your word that you are from Bell."

He gave me a toll free number, that he said would say he is from Bell.

I followed this number with a reverse look up... to find out it was owned by Paetec. Any further look ups do not show much of any affiliation with Bell.

BTW, when given silly numbers like that, I suggest doing a reverse lookup on them, before going further.

I mean, okay--had his scam been well polished enough... I would have bitten. I would have... but in this case, the issues were:

• Compression issues in the phone calls. It was like listening to a 68KBPS MP3 that had been put onto vinyl. There was also a fair amount of background noise. Sounded like he was doing this on a pay phone really. Do a better sounding phone call, and cut out that background crap.
• The prompt contact by the busy supervisor. There are a lot of people that a free phone would be nice to give to, and he did say he was busy--seriously... fifteen minutes would be a standard minimum wait, I'd think.
• The lack of hold. That I could not be put onto hold, while his supervisor was contacted. Waiting on hold for fifteen minutes would have made me a lot more convinced.
• The fact that on the look up of his "Official Bell Agent Number" it did not list itself as being affiliated in anyway with Bell Canada. Further more, it was a number from a US Asterisk company. Had his number been registered as something that looked like it was Bell Canada, I would have been inclined to bite even more so.

If these details would have been removed, without any others, I probably would have bought into it.

Come on people--put some effort into these scams! You are better than this!

Comment Spam's Real Purpose

I have an old blog. I do not think it is even public viewer able anymore. I mean I do not give the link to the domain it is on anymore. Then once you get into there, it is a directory listing. After navigating this listing to find the directory with the working version of the blog, there is a blog, with no major comments appearing on the first page.

To get to comments, you need to click a page or post.

Now, this old blog has not been updated since April 2007. Yes, I still get comments showing up in my moderation queue.

Roughly around Novembre 2009, I started clicking on a few links. The thing is, the links that they are heading to do not match the description.

Even more so, they tend to be also for dying or near dying projects. Sites that still need care to them. Usually these sites were for some fairly decent ideas and projects. Very rarely were they or scams or porn.

Then it hit me.

Comment spam exists only to lower a site's ranking in Google. There is nothing trying to be sold. Only vandalism of another company's service.

I kind of got suspicious when all the links were leading to other forum posts and other comments and not an actual site. Usually these rings of comments do not actually go to the stuff that the spam advertises. They just go to more comment spam.

Then we get into the issues that spam bots seem to prefer to target dead or dying websites. What is even worse, there is some idea in my head, that the more novel an idea, despite any issues they have in getting it forward, and the more that project is struggling, the more comment spam it starts to gain the attention from.

I then had a rather nice idea. This network of spam comments could be used against the companies trying to rank down that site's ranking in Google.

This would be done via plugin into a system that handles user interaction. Generally working via a post approval system. Possibly with a post tidying and reporting system on some really busy websites.

Once something has the spam target, it then is sent to the spam spider. The spam spider, will then go through the links on the site. Identifying what sites the comment spam links to, iding whether that site exists in the spam spider database already. With another "comment spam count" on it as well.

If it does not exist in the spam spider database, we wait until a threshold hits a certain amount of spam counts. It is then sent to somebody to review the site. The site is not designated by the comment field. The spam spider tries to find the base URL, and attempts to gather any relevant information on the site, via meta tags, link tags, bold/strong text, header tags, title tag and via the Vernacular System I plan to put into Kid Norrin.

This summary is given to the person reviewing the site, who then rates the accuracy of the summary--so as to try to grade the system presented. Mostly keeping track of origin of this comment spam link, xhtml/html validity, use of flash, the vernacular of the comment link, the vernacular of the site or images on the site, location of the entry's server, and if the comment had a IP Address attached, the region of the IP address.

I hope that eventually tags could be placed onto these sort of summaries for content material. Then once reviewed, the spam spider reviewer would flag it for public viewing.

And, this my friends is why I need to eventually put my code where my mouth is X3

Adblocker Negator

 I have been thinking of a system designed to work around ad block.

Ad block typically works by searching for various URLs in the page, in script, img and a tags. If items in the URLs match the ad block requirements, then the ad is blocked.

I did consider the idea of simply going with a new work. Like "gooble" for an ad script, or directory. However, it would be fairly quick to add that into the standard blocks.

Naw, what would need to be done, is an ad script location that constantly changes. Constantly modifies itself. Perhaps is constantly randomly generated.

Now, mod_rewrite scripts are full able to take a randomised URL, and point it to a file. The randomised URL could be pointed to match various predicted profiles of a user. Based on IP Address region of the world, suggested ad material, and various other factors. Each of these dynamics attracted would have several random URLs attached to them.

Now, to get the URL, a form of mash up would probably be best. The server the ad is on, would likely use a RESTful API to grab the domain and URL to post to the client. This would generally allow the next bit.

Random domain names. While analysing my spam, I noticed a fair amount of bot generated domain names. Usually these are made up of gibberish letters followed by dotcom, with a gibberish path afterwards.

I kind of suspect that these URLs exist as a form of HASH for the spam sent. As well as the email it targeted. So as to predict and propagate better spam tactics. See which emails gain better responses, to concentrate on those more, for this profile being targeted.

In this case, rather than posting a single throw away site, it would instead have a nice ngine based proxy to point the content on the site to come from the main server. Making the original IP address of the ad network transparent.

Trust me--this should start appearing soon. I am kind of surprised it has not already.

I dunno--I kind of imagine that if I was running spam bots, the internet would be much more scary.