

Ask HN: Why do people create incomprehensible spam? - benev

I run a blog with comments and spam's a bit of a problem. I get that in some cases people try to put links on their for various reasons. However, we also get a lot that doesn't seem to serve any purpose. for example, on from today:<p>"chanel 化粧品tf szn bttt fy mlfpy urdirp cfyss<p>pletcherdrw - March 15, 2013 @ 8:08am<p>ku gcfd hsff pvs tqmu hntu qyo xdij gb fb rxi sjrp jszl hww hwdj kigk zav vkbx sc"<p>They've had to beat a captcha to post that. I know that's not the most difficult thing in the world, but it does require some effort. What advantage does this create for anyone?<p>According to Google translate, the Chinese characters mean 'cosmetic.'
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UnoriginalGuy
Maybe they're trying to post in an unsupported language or a partly
unsupported language?

Also could just be sending out "test spam" so they can tell potentially
clients that they have a n+1 list of sites which can be spammed for $50 (or
whatever).

You often have SEO companies in particular buying lists of spammable sites or
spam companies buying lists from indexers so they can sell a service to SEO
companies or the mob.

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mschuster91
Entropy messes up certain kinds of anti-spam solutions. And captcha beating is
mostly automated these days.

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benev
Are you saying this is decoy spam sent purely to try and confuse my anti-spam
system? It's an interesting idea.

~~~
what_the_frell
Does your comment system strip out HTML tags and CSS? I used to work for an
anti-spam company, and I'd see tons of those messages. It looks like garbage
when you view the raw text, but with a bunch of font-tags everywhere
alternating colours or floating things around, you end up with a message.

