#1 2007-12-27 2:51 pm

carolyn

Member

Registered: 2007-12-03

Posts: 3

Here's one not on the list

Date: Dec 25th, 2007, 2:38pm PST
IP address: (200.129.43.168)
Username: stock-nelikvid
Email Address:  unknown
Country: Brazil

Albatross

Member

Registered: 2007-12-19

Posts: 5

Re: Here's one not on the list

Well Carolyn, there is proof positive that forum spammers do not take Christmas off...

You have no email address for this low-life? I don't think it can be added without one.

OK, while the IP is Brazilian, and the email is missing, I have found the user name itself in the database.

Date  IP address  Username  Email Address 
12/19/07 3:58 PM 194.0.206.104 stock-nelikvid stock-nelikvid@mail.ru 

Last time he was Russian, go figure.

Russ

Guest

Re: Here's one not on the list

I try to make sure full registration details are stored - email address, username, and IP.

lv2jm

Member

From: Northern Ontario

Registered: 2007-11-30

Posts: 6

Re: Here's one not on the list

I have found that lately that userlist spammers (the ones that register but for some reason never activate)don't use a constant username when they register in different forums.....the constant seems to be the e-mail address for some reason.
A search engine search of the e-mail addy produces hits with multiple usernames for the same address........strange....and for what purpose?????

susato

Member

Registered: 2007-12-01

Posts: 18

Re: Here's one not on the list

I've noticed the same thing, and not only with userlist spammers but with those who activate as well.  (Even then, they don't get past my manual review)

I reckon they do it to hide from the search engines so that administrators' searches on the username won't as easily indicate a forum spammer.

A year ago nearly all spambots used the same username on all their forum registrations.  By running a Google search on a combination of the spambot's username and the word forum, you could easily detect a spambot.  Sometimes thousands of hits would come up, all timestamped within the preceding 12-18 hours. 

Now that easy test is spoiled.  While you can search on the email address (and the word forum), most fora don't publish registrants' email addresses, so you might only get 3-4 hits.  The nice thing about lists like Russ's is that the email address is out in the open and searchable... getting a search engine hit on a suspicious email here is proof positive that the user is a spammer - and those hits appear to be the primary factor bringing new forum members to this site.

If you look through Russ's list of forum spammers, you'll also see instances where a single username is associated with two or more email addresses.

It takes a whole community of committed users to stay ahead of the bad guys.

Albatross

Member

Registered: 2007-12-19

Posts: 5

Re: Here's one not on the list

Oh we'll never get ahead of them. There's just too many of them and they have both too much motivation (money is always the world's greatest motivator) and too much time on their hands. They are busy as I type this, thinking up new usernames, creating new email addresses, and above all searching for new domains they can use as IP proxies.

All we can do is to keep posting and listing their current infos, and forcing them to work just a littlke bit harder