October 23, 2003
Link Spam Alert
Both Jaquandor at Byzantium's Shores and Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light report a new p*rn scam targeted at blogs.
This is what the scammers have done as described by Teresa:
The other thing this supposed weblog has is a titanic blogroll some 3,500 entries long. It�s an utterly indiscriminate list. It links to conservative religious websites, and to weblogs in languages that don�t use the Roman alphabet and haven�t been transliterated, and to random pages on About.com, and to the official website of the California Sociological Association, to name but a few.I won't give the scammers a link or name their site. Just be aware that if you have a new linking site that you don't recognize and that has a title that suggests you might get to read about someone's carnal adventures then you will get some apparently poorly done versions of that and a whole bunch of p*rn advertising. Posted by Steve on October 23, 2003It looks like the proprietors harvested the addresses of everything that looked like a weblog and tossed them into their list, not even pausing to weed out the false positives. The links go out, the webloggers learn via Technorati or some comparable site that they�ve been linked to, and they go to have a look.
