[WikiEN-l] Tracking spam for fun and profit

[Alvaro García]

You have Gmail and your spam filter works badly? Hm, strange.


--
Alvaro

On 18-01-2009, at 13:08, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l