Spam spam spam spammity spam

[gothwalk]

Sometimes, I really can't work out what spammers are after. A list I'm on was vigourously bombarded - about 50 copies got through before an admin got on the case - with a listing of reg codes for Microsoft stuff, up to and including a beta build of Longhorn. I can see why someone might send a single copy, but not 50. And there's no benefit in sight.

And there's a very well written one in this morning to Swiftpay from "Elizabeth Richson", saying that she writes for a website, has linked to us, and would we be interested in linking back to her? Apparently she found us by searching for a given search term, which is one that you'd reasonably find Swiftpay on. If it wasn't for the slightly klunky line of "My site is all about Finance - Misc too", I wouldn't even have glanced at the headers. But it turns out to be from a non-existent domain, and in something mildly mindboggling, googling for that name gives a total of two results, neither connected in any way to finance sites. So a mail asking for a link to a site which doesn't seem to exist, from an email address that can't be replied to, which was generated by a clever program tripped up only by the fact that the category the site is listed under didn't fit as a natural language noun. Why? How can anyone possibly profit by sending this?

Comments

Elizabeth Richson

[(Anonymous)]

Hi I received an email and she wanted me to post this link on my site
Born (http://www.discountshoeguide.com/Born.html)
Has anyone gotten this?

Re: Elizabeth Richson

[rossga9.livejournal.com]

Hi everyone.
I got the Elizabeth richson spam yesterday as an email from Sarah at Sarahpage. It sounded quite genuine, as the facts were right. If this is a spam bot, it's incredibly sophisticated. I have a site offering rental accommodation in france, and "Sarah" said she'd found my site in google while looking for a rental cottage in the Loire valley. She presented herself as a travel writer, and asked for a return link.
As she gave no address to link to, I presumed that she was just a bit amateurish, so emailed back to ask for an address to check out before linking to it. this is what I got back:
startquote:
"Like I said before, I'm already linked to you. You can link to me here with this code: Holiday Valley
I added you into this directory of hand reviewed sites called High Index. I submit things to them as an editor, and got you up as a featured listing in the following category: http://www.highindex.com/Regional/Europe/France/Regions/Poitou-Charentes/Vienne/Travel_and_Tourism/Lodging/
You can click on that link if you want to check it out.
Thought you might like that. Anyway, I'll leave you up there for a few days until i hear from you. If i don't hear back, I will have to take the link down. Thanks again. I look forward to swapping links with you soon!"
endquote:
I followed up the links.
Holiday valley was a link to a site called
http://www.ellicottvillerentalguide.com/
which seems perfectly normal - it's quite genuine, and listed in Yahoo.
Presumably Sarah was not in the least bit responsible for the listing in highindex.com, which is also a real web index by the look of it.

Can anyone see where this one is going? Cos I don't. It's a pretty elaborate hoax, but seems pretty pointless. It can't be big time, cos otherwise there'd be more about it on the Web. It took me a long time to find this forum !! Our site does not handle money nor take payments, is protected by firewalls and spybots and almost all spam mail is filtered out by careful word lists.
There's more information about this puzzling spam on
http://www.fneeb.co.uk/news/archives/00000110.php
but no more clue as to what it's up to....