#1 2016-06-25 12:52 pm

Alex Kemp

Moderator

From: Nottingham, England

Registered: 2009-12-02

Posts: 2,423

Website

Spam via PM on SFS: Not Advised

"damian01rita" was stupid enough to send a PM to a SFS Moderator today titled "From Miss Rita":-

My Dear,
In confidence,I have to introduce myself for I am Miss Rita Damian, the only child of late Mr. and Mrs. George Damian, I wish to request for your assistance in my efforts to procure the transfer of my inherited money for investment ventures Overseas which was secured in one prime bank here in my country by my father before his death. The amount is seven million dollars( $7.000.000.00 ) Deposited in a Suspense account. my name as the next of kin to the deposit. I will require your assistance in receiving the transfer of the money in your local bank account for investment purposes. As it is my desire to come over to your country to further my education after the transfer while you take care of the investment of the money. I will be glad to offer you a reasonable ratio for your co-operation in investing this money and everything is going to be under your care while i am in school to accomplish my studies. Please and please I will be highly appreciated if you can return to me with urgent dispatch to enable me contact you with more details. Copy my private e-mail use it to get back to me so that i will send you some of my pictures.
(   damian2rita@gmail.com    )
I await to receive your immediate response.
My Kind Regards!
Miss Rita Damian.

I do not believe that SFS has had this before.

damian01rita is now banned under SFS, and also reported to the SFS spam DB (spam PMs via a forum PM system is calibrated as Forum Spam, and thus the person may be reported to SFS in the normal way). In fact, damian01rita has been reported twice to SFS; once for the email address within the Profile & once for the PM email address.

Astonishing!

Just in case other folks are still naive about these types of email/PM messages:—
The very best, most efficient method to lose your time & money is to respond to such communications. The folks that post such messages rely on the recipients being even more stupid and greedy than themselves.

Important!:
The SFS reporting system is for Forum Spam, only. Email spam needs to be reported through other mechanisms.

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Alex Kemp

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NeoFox

Member

From: WI, USA, Earth

Registered: 2013-09-26

Posts: 830

Website

Re: Spam via PM on SFS: Not Advised

Ah hahaha. Geeze.

Papa Parrot

Member

From: Mexico

Registered: 2011-08-19

Posts: 1,826

Website

Re: Spam via PM on SFS: Not Advised

Just now 2 posts, in this thread:

FINANCING AGREEMENT
We offer loans ranging from 2,000 (£, $, €) to over 20 million (£, $, €) to anyone able to repay it with interest rate 3% unlike the Bank which a rate of 8% .And our repayment terms you free choice from 1 to 10 years or more, renewable, depending on the amount.
Contact us directly by email for more accuracy
All my regards.
Mr: FORTUNATO Ramirez
----snip-- email address removed----

Submitted and banned : http://www.stopforumspam.com/ipcheck/41.85.163.145

On this one :

"damian01rita" was stupid enough to send a PM to a SFS Moderator today titled "From Miss Rita":

There was also a post on the forum, I deleted, but also submitted:
http://www.stopforumspam.com/evidence/132716315
I guess I should have included a note , in the evidence....but even worse, I forgot to ban them,
I am not sure if the PM occurred after or at the same time, but any way, glad to know Alex did
ban them.
   It is VERY important, if anyone does receive PM spam, report it to us,  we can not see your
PM account, so unless it gets reported we have no way of knowing there was spam sent to a PM account.

It is kind of odd, on these because they look like e-mail spam, but they were posted on the forum,
and in the forums PM accounts, so they are "forum spam",
  As Alex says though, if it is e-mail you have received, on your personal e-mail account, that can not be submitted.

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Everything is for the Birds

And now, Papa Parrot and his kids

sklerder

Member

Registered: 2012-10-11

Posts: 336

Website

Re: Spam via PM on SFS: Not Advised

Hi !

There was also a post on the forum, I deleted, but also submitted:
http://www.stopforumspam.com/evidence/132716315
I guess I should have included a note , in the evidence....but even worse, I forgot to ban them,
I am not sure if the PM occurred after or at the same time, but any way, glad to know Alex did
ban them.

On another forum where I'm moderator, we never delete spams (nor delete posts), we put them in a forum (a rubric, that we called 'vertical filing') that only the staff can see. We do this because we decided to never delete posts ...
While doing so, it's easy to find additional information later ...
Here, it would have helped you to compare posting dates.

Last edited by sklerder (2016-06-26 9:04 pm)

Papa Parrot

Member

From: Mexico

Registered: 2011-08-19

Posts: 1,826

Website

Re: Spam via PM on SFS: Not Advised

On another forum, we do the same, the "spam" posts get moved to a special board, only
admins and mods can see it, the the admins do what they want with it, they are the ones that
either submit it, report it here, ... after that it gets deleted.
   We have a "trash" bin, or board here, where they can be moved to , and many are.

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Everything is for the Birds

And now, Papa Parrot and his kids

lisati

Member

From: Porirua, New Zealand

Registered: 2011-04-14

Posts: 340

Re: Spam via PM on SFS: Not Advised

I noticed the spam post, and decided to have a bit of fun with the apparent sender using the email address in the post, using an email address I have with a joke name. No response yet, but I'm not holding my breath.

Likewise with another forum where I'm a moderator. We move the offending posts out of public view, do the spam-ban thing, and leave it to the admin team to do whatever further action they see fit.

Papa Parrot

Member

From: Mexico

Registered: 2011-08-19

Posts: 1,826

Website

Re: Spam via PM on SFS: Not Advised

I did that once, a long time ago, with one I received via e-mail,    and they sent another e-mail, giving me a phone number
they wanted me to call, to help verify if it was really legit.
What they wanted was my bank account info, so they could transfer the millions to my
account, they even sent me some forms to fill out ,...
I said, I would let my lawyer handle it, and make sure everything was ok.
  The response, "Oh no , please don't do that, it is extremely important that this
be kept confidential, between us. Please do not give the information to anyone else."

  So I sent a reply, " My lawyer said,  if you are not willing to communicate with him,
  then it probably is not legit".  and I never heard back from them again.

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Everything is for the Birds

And now, Papa Parrot and his kids

kpatz

Member

Registered: 2008-10-09

Posts: 1,437

Re: Spam via PM on SFS: Not Advised

PM spam qualifies as one of the stupidest kinds of spam.  They don't help with search engine rankings whatsoever, which is what most forum spam is intended to do.  They're just fishing (or phishing) to see if any recipients are stupid enough to respond, much like email spam.  Since spammers are amongst the stupidest people on the planet, it's hard for them to comprehend that 99.999% of us are smarter than them.  Of course, if they target that 0.0001% that's as dumb as they are, they succeed in their goal.

With email spam, they can spew out to millions of email addresses and probably find one or two stupid or naive enough to respond.  But with PM spam, forums usually target a specific area of interest, and the membership tends to be smarter overall than the random email user.  Plus it's not likely that anyone on an average interest forum would fall for a completely off topic spam PM.  So why they waste their time with PM spam, I don't know.  Guess they really are the dumbest people on the planet.

Of course, those who are in the 0.0000001th percentile of intelligence would pick a forum with "Stop" and "Spam" in their title to post or PM spam.

Last edited by kpatz (2016-06-26 4:14 pm)

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Spam happens when greed meets stupidity.

Papa Parrot

Member

From: Mexico

Registered: 2011-08-19

Posts: 1,826

Website

Re: Spam via PM on SFS: Not Advised

A while back we had one that joined the forum , and asked a few questions, appeared to be a "normal" user,
Then they started sending PM s to everybody,  not exactly "spam" or fishing (or phishing), well kind of "fishing",
I guess.
    It was religious propaganda,   the first members to report it happened to be a different religion, and found it
offensive,  so any way the member got permanently banned,  I am not sure if the admins submitted it as "spam"
probably not, but it still could be considered spam.

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Everything is for the Birds

And now, Papa Parrot and his kids

kpatz

Member

Registered: 2008-10-09

Posts: 1,437

Re: Spam via PM on SFS: Not Advised

If that wasn't on a religious forum (for the religion that was PMed about), it was certainly spam and reportable.

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Spam happens when greed meets stupidity.