Auction as Spam Vector
I’m selling an old laptop on eBay, and since posting the auction, I’ve had 5 “questions posed by potential buyers” that were spam.
eBay lets buyers ask questions about the products being sold, and because these questions could be from potential buyers (and always were, my experience, up until yesterday), sellers need to read and answer these questions in a timely manner. It’s not something you can just ignore. So it’s an effective attention vector.
They say the spammers wouldn’t be spamming if it didn’t work, but it’s hard to believe that anyone could be in a buying mood after getting tricked into reading spam this way.
How big a problem is this? Anyone else find a particularly interesting spam vector?
August 5th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
I find “referral spam” (where spammers generate fake links to posts on my blog) to be interesting. The only person who sees the URLs is me - no-one else has permission to see the referral logs for my site - yet I still see the odd one pop up.