[WikiEN-l] Tracking spam for fun and profit

[brewhaha%40edmc.net]

I used hotmail once, for a throwaway account on a mailing list that I did 
not want to be associated with. Making it reject spam from MicroSoft was 
doable at the time, and it was still an insurmountable pain to use with 
Lynx. Spam is probably on side-bars there, now. Hint for moderators: Learn 
how to set up an account from your ISP. All communication involves risk.

"Alvaro García" <alvareo at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:3911BC3C-D99B-4874-B0C9-97A4BC80BD65 at gmail.com...
> 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
>>
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