I picture some millennial in a basement
It took long enough, for a bit I was starting to worry. Since I moved from my other hosting account to here, the spammers ceased 
for a while. I imagined bits and bytes of spammer data, reaching the old address and coming up empty. Of course its human master has no idea I’m gone, unless the mindless machine reaches a predetermined failure point, and alerts him that he can use the CPU cycles better harassing someone else. I picture some millennial in a basement of his parents home, computers humming, raking in some spending money for the weekend, by making others miserable spamming their sites or inboxes.
Strangely, I’ve never studied the actual business model of spam. It must pay something, or there are just some twisted individuals behind the keyboards. They get paid by click. They send something stupid, many times just gibberish, then someone somewhere clicks on a link in it, and they get paid for that click. Anyway, I’m no longer lonely, I have a couple every 3-4 days drop in past the Askimet filter. Such is life.
I’ve watched for months, as some automated bot tries tons of different names in an attempt to login as a current member on my forum site. Every couple hours, it submits a login 4 times, then has to wait as it was auto locked out for 15 minutes. Then it returns later for another round. It always appeared to come from random countries, making it impossible to block by IP. The crazy thing? It’s a really stupid bot. Of course, it was set up by some human of equal intelligence. It tries to login with Jnosedkl or tnir*com#f!. It appears to be trying random passwords (probably from a list), in the name box. Now that, is some backwards logic. Mindlessly, for the last 5 months, every few hours. Anyway, I’m getting too deep into all that. Very boring to most people.
How much spam are you suffering from, these days.
Comments always welcome,
I get persistent ‘dating’ spam in my email, usually offering Russian Brides. They obviously don’t know I am married, and although I have been to Russia, it was a long time ago now. On the blog, most spam is filtered out by WordPress, so they try to comment by using standard lines like “Nice Post”, “Interesting”, or “Well written”. They are too obvious though, so never get through. Then they try to ‘like’ comments by others, or reply to their comments, presumably hoping that person will click on their site. But I delete those too.
The first week I was blogging, in 2012, I knew no better so clicked on a link promising to make me ‘a fortune from Blogging’. The premise was simple. For just $25, they would send me a ‘how to’ guide which involved sending out thousands of similar emails, in the hope of selling my own $25 ‘guide’. We used to call that ‘Pyramid selling’. Naturally, I didn’t send any money. 🙂
Best wishes, Pete.
Yes, they do some pretty crafty things to slide by filters at times. I get dating, viagra, promises to make my site searched faster and on and on. I’m glad you caught onto that Pyramid scheme, we all fall for something when learning new things. I’m self hosted, so I use wordfence and the Askimet plugin, stops a lot of it. Thanks for the great comment Pete, Stay cool, I hear it’s hot over there this year.
I get a lot of spam- Brides, clothes, sometime lurid comments. Sometimes phone calls on Whatsapp and Viber.
Susie
I know what your saying. I get the lewd ones too, they always seem to arrive when Michelle has walked in the room. She likes to tease me about it. I have never been into Skype and whatsapp and the others, so have not had the pleasure of getting the phone calls. Thanks for the comment susie.
My spam is mostly for male enhancement meds. I am a post menopausal woman with no interest in male enhancements!
Ah Kate. That is just too funny. Reminds me of the investigation I had to do, when I worked as Police Investigator with mental health. We had a doctor trying to defraud medicare. He billed them for a hysterectomy for a 25 year old……. guy. That was weird. They truly get dumb with some of the things they send out.
I also am constantly getting promotions so that I can “make her scream in pleasure for hours.” Since I am a straight woman, this does not appeal to me. Actually I have no interest in screaming in pleasure for hours myself! Lots of ads for “make it hard as a rock.” Also lots of Asian women and Russian women.
Sex toys and bondage junk. That’s what I get sometimes. I get a good laugh at what they send though. I wonder what the Russian Brides are going for now. LOL! Thanks for the laugh tonight Elizabeth.
I routinely find spam in my WordPress spam folder (it’s pretty good at catching it all). Most of it is gobbly-gook but some are pretty funny. Like you, I find it hard to imagine what the point is.
Some of them are hilarious. But there are people that get curious about the links and click them, just to see where they go. Most people don’t include more than maybe one link in a comment, if you know them. So I set mine to queue any comment with more than 1 or 2 links in it. It has caught all of them so far, and I just hit “empty spam”. It’s like playing Whack-a-Mole. I read today an OLD article from 2004. It was an interview with a spammer. He said he had to sent out 5 million emails, just to make a profit for a day. He did say he was averaging about $1200 a week sometimes. They sent out an obscene amount of emails and comments, just to make some money. Thanks for the comment, Janis, always a pleasure to see you.
Ha, I just read the comments here, so funny, especially Elizabeth’s! “Screaming with pleasure”… no, mine start of coyly, they just wanna meet me, these poor misguided…women. Eye roll.
I see occasionally a mssg in which the From line features the real name of one of my real contacts. But inside there’s a nonsensical link to click on. Yeah, I don’t think so!!!!!
And of course there are the variations of the Nigerian prince emails, promising riches, the amounts of which are getting larger all the time, e.g. “up to” $19.5 million.
There are only 8 spam mssgs in my inbox since Saturday. Not too shabby. OUT they go!
Yes, that was pretty funny. I think I had six this morning, but I forgot to check the last couple of days. I keep meaning to check into my millions they are holding for me.