[WikiEN-l] Tracking spam for fun and profit

[Andrew Gray]

Those of you whose spam filters work as badly as mine are no doubt
familiar with the genre of 419 spam emails. You know the thing, "Dear
Respected Sir. I am the Minister for Trade of Nigeria, and I wish to
embezzle a BILLION dollars AMERICAN..." One element of these that you
occasionally see is "supporting evidence" - the writer tries to give
the impression the email is legitimate by linking to an entirely
respectable but irrelevant news story which proves the person they're
claiming to be actually exists, in the hope that this will make the
whole thing seem legit.

Last month, I got one purporting to be from Maria das Neves, the
former Prime Minister of São Tomé and Principe. What immediately
caught my attention, as I went to hit delete, was that it linked not
to a newspaper article about her, but the Wikipedia article (which it
referred to as "my profile")

This was on 15th December. And sure enough, if we look at the December
statistics for that page, we find that about four hundred people
followed the link over a couple of days:
http://stats.grok.se/en/200811/Maria_das_Neves

There's a second, smaller, spike at the end of the month; a second
run? If we look back there's also one around November 24th, and one
yesterday (January 17th).

An entirely unexpected application of stats.grok.se, there!

On a more relevant content note, it seems most of these "waves" led
people to add warnings about it to the article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_das_Neves&diff=258161984&oldid=251397327
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_das_Neves&diff=260979984&oldid=258164279
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_das_Neves&diff=264791843&oldid=262290274

...so the "you can edit" idea must be getting fairly apparent even
among people who read spam :-)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk