Tuesday, September 03, 2013

More Linkbucks Connected Spam

Some more referral spam has shown up on Blogger and one provided an unexpected connection to two earlier ones. The first was reported by commenter Charlotte and arrived as 0288c729 . qqc . co which leads to Linkbucks again like a link that started with ceae2122.

So what do you get if you click on that odd string of numbers and letters?

o288c729 Spam 01o288c729 Spam 02

First up is an ad telling you that you absolutely need to download a download manager. Yeah, like that won’t lead to bad things on your system. Remember kids, don’t try this at home and don’t trust strange links. Never click on anything you don’t already know and that includes things sent by trusted friends.

o288c729 Spam 03

Clicking on “skip the ad” brings up an error message just like with ceae3122 did. Somehow I was not surprised since there was a suspicion that the same person is behind the new link.

However, there was a surprise yet to come.

o288c729 Spam 04

While I was taking the screenshot of the error message that popped up in a new tab, this loaded behind it. Wait a second… that looks strangely familiar. It’s the survey scammers from A.W. Well, well. What we have here is three referral spams that are all connected. Interesting, eh?

Bonus Spam

A couple more failed spam links showed up this past week too. Bothe were miserable failures.

scarpasoftware spam

gateway . scarpasoftware . net netted this placeholder. That’s an instant fail if I’ve ever seen one.

cheap-malls

Topping that failure required something special and www . cheap-malls . com managed to pull that off. It wouldn’t load at all and a Google search pulled this up, but once again it wouldn’t load. Epic fail to spam!

6 comments:

Shell said...

Yeah, I just had that one on my blog too, c&p the link into Google and found your post

Patrick D. Boone said...

Glad to help!

Ram P Bhatt said...

Patrick, you are going great community service by quickly identifying these blogger spams. I am glad your blog post about these spams shows up in top 10 Google search results.

Patrick D. Boone said...

Thank you, Ram.

Rebecca said...

Majority of my referals are from these links. Very glad i googled them rather than clicked on them, thank you!

Patrick D. Boone said...

Rebecca - You're welcome!

The thing I most dislike about these spammers is the way their fake referrals disillusions beginning or small scale bloggers. It's a heck of a blow to realize you really weren't linked after getting excited about it.