We regularly get crap through our contact forms -- from people, not bots -- and I wanted to share one of them here today.
Most times, the spam is for "SEO services" (spammers for hire) with IPs that trace back to India and Pakistan. Other times, it's cheapware (software) companies trying to buy/swap links, or push their affiliate program. Notice how they don't even care about getting a fair review of the product -- they just want your help selling it, without buying banner advertising. (The proper response = "No!" In fact, hell no.) Most of these spam mails come from China and the Philippines.
What makes spam fun is when you catch obvious lies, thanks to anti-spam techniques.
Code:
Jen (affiliates@anyprotect.com) is e-mailing you about
Request that we review your product, service or company. (Advertising with us is also suggested!)
Message: Hey There,
I’m the Affiliate Manager of AnyProtect.com.
I’m contacting you because we have seen your website and we believe you can make much more money with us using your traffic. We will be very excited to see you join us, making tons of money and a bonus: get paid for every sale IMMEDIATELY.
With our affiliate program you can:
ü Earn up to $139 with every sale
ü IMMEDIATELY get paid at the point of sale
ü Get a pre-set of successful tools – banners / landing pages / coupons
ü Use top-leading offers with high conversion rate
ü Earn from an extended 60-day cookie duration
ü Win performance incentives & bonus payouts
So we’d love to find out how you can promote us in your website.
Let us know if you have any request on how to incent your users to purchase AnyProtect products.
Join us at this page http://bit.ly/R6OITZ
Thank you
Contact Details:
IP: 203.87.174.35
E-mail: affiliates@anyprotect.com
Forum Username: Unregistered (ID=0)
Referring Page: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/sendmessage.php&sa=D&usg=ALhdy28a4n-F5e02mwYp_pMo2w160yBOjg
.
I like the lie of "we have seen your website" ... when it's obviously BS. Do you see the referring page? Notice how it points to Google, instead of a digitalFAQ.com page? That's because this shyster was searching Google for contact forms -- likely "sendmessage.php", which is a standard vBulletin file location. Though ours is heavily modified (with both visible and invisible tweaks), the name was never changed.
The broken Engrish can be amusing, too. You want me to do what to my users? "incent" them! Sounds personal!
I also like the copy/paste from some other document. The "ü" character (with a tab afterwards) is a stripped bullet of some kind. When somebody contacts me, I expect a typed message, not something that's been bulk copy/pasted. Bulk mail usually gets put into a shredder, and bulk email ends up demolished by my favorite keyboard button: the DELETE key!
The final icing on the cake is that this person has had to resort to manual contact form spam, because their IP space and email addresses have been burned by the popular StopForumSpam system -- see attached JPEG below -- which is one of the factors at play in this forum's anti-spam measures. (We have about 6 methods of decrapifying our traffic to the forum, and that's one of them.)
Another spammer defeated!
