Spam and an Apparent Pyramid Scheme

Commenter Charlotte gave a heads up that a new spammer has shown up in Bloggers stats so I checked it out several days ago. I didn’t get the spam myself and wasn’t feeling the love from referral spammers. Then the last 24 hours produced 22 spam hits of various kinds including the new one awsurveys . com / ?R=1070526 which showed up seven times. I guess they still love me. Is this what they call “bad love”? UPDATED with another link being used and a shady service connected to it.

So I fired up my virtual PC and checked out the link. Remember folks, don’t try this yourself! Clicking on referral link spam can cause any number of problems including getting you computer infected with malware.

This particular bit of spam is put out by an online survey company which appears to be setup like a Ponzi or pyramid scheme. The money is made by recruiting others to join and of course requires you to pay money to become premium member in hopes of making more money off of taking surveys. That’s a huge warning sign right there.

Having briefly been involved in taking online surveys years ago for a legitimate company that acted as a middle man, I can say there isn’t much money to be made. You have to be willing to spend as many hours as working a real job to make less money! This one looks to be far shadier since you can’t get details without actually joining. It is another huge warning sign.

My advice it to avoid the site like the plague. Even the ads on the sidebar on the right link to another site setup by the same people.

The sheer volume of referral spam hits can overwhelm small blogs and give false hope that somebody has liked then linked to one’s blog. It is pretty exciting to see that happen the first time then horrifying to realize it isn’t for real. Worse some of the sites in the referring URLs can deposit malware on your system like a cyber STD. I didn’t see any show up from this site, though running a browser on Linux doesn’t always trigger that the way a Windows one would. 

Often things are too good to be true on the Web and even comments or links from Blogspot hosted blogs can be from spammers including those who do it the old fashioned way of personally visiting your blog through the comments. Always be careful and remember that paranoia is a good thing when dealing with the online world.

UPDATE: A new link showing up in referral stats also leads to this page. adfoc . us / 1213529064355 leads to another site at first and then to awsurveys.

Clicking on the link takes one to the page on the left. I had to click on “skip” in order to find out what lurked behind the link. It turned out to be our old friend on the right. So what is adfoc . us?

They are a link shortening service like bitly or Twitter’s t.co, but with a difference: you get paid for each link if it gets enough hits. That will encourage people to spam on forums, Twitter, Facebook, and yes, referrals. Yet that is not the end of the story.

It turns out adfoc has earned the ire of the hacking and make money from home con artists for not paying out. So it is a service of con artists ripping off other con artists and thieves. I won’t link to the sites talking about them due to their being shady as well, but if you are really interested you can do a search on the subject.