Hot New Spam Tactic: Link Extortion
This morning I got a new kind of comment I had not seen before:
hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments, I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you
Wow. That’s definitely a new one. I think my favorite part is “I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site”. It seems Richard is implying that he personally knows all the spammers who are responsible for 30-50% of spam comments worldwide. This makes me want to buy Richard a t-shirt for being so clever and coming up with such an innovative link extortion scheme.
Actually this might be “link blackmail” more than “link extortion”. I’m too busy deleting spam comments to lookup the right definition.
Iain Calvert said,
September 6, 2007 @ 5:18 am
You have to give him credit, it is a new idea. Spam the crap out of somebodies blog then offer to stop if they give you a link the man is a genious!
You gave him a link right? ;)
You could take this to so many new levels
“Tell you what I will stop the dns attack if you link to me”
“Dear Larry I will release Sergey once you place a link on Googles home page to my viagra site”