A persistent and abusive spammer killed of my top 4000 Alexa rated froum last year, and forced me into opening it on a new domain with a more secure script. So I’m not too happy that some new low-cost, automated, forum spamming software is now being promoted.

A lot of people are probably going to buy it (though I’d hope that the better-known internet marketers with their huge mailing lists will refuse to promote it, which will slow down sales) but after reading the salesletter for this software, I’ve realized that it’s not all that advanced/automated, so I’m nowhere near as worried about it as I am about a spam tool I’ve seen in action.
It’s a far more advanced forum spamming tool that’s very worrying because it seems unstopable. And it’s very clever.

It keyword targets forums and uses auto writing based on a large number of phrases you put into a database to create unique posts for each forum you target. It’s very hard to tell it’s an automated posting. It can sign up for member only forums, and reply to confirmation emails, but can’t get around the captchas automatically.

What it does though is create a list of all the forums it couldn’t get into because of captchas, and that list is put into an Excel file which is emailed at the end of the posting session to a group of people in India, who will then go to the forums in question and enter the captchas manually for a few cents a time. They can do quite a lot of these every minute so the cost to the spammer is low.

Co-incidentally there’s a story in this weeks onlineline version of the Guardian (UK) newspaper about employing people in India to get you past the captchas.

You can read more concerns about this forum script on Paul Myers blog