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Here’s an oddity that washed up in this morning’s tide:

From: Montgomery, Luke <Luke.Montgomery@tektronix.com>
To: dan@dansdata.com
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:18:47 -0700
Subject: Tektronix Site Resource

Dear Daniel Rutter,

I found your website, Dan’s Data and wanted to thank you for providing such great information about PC Hardware and Gadgets. I was wondering if it would be possible to provide a link to our website (http://www.tek.com/products/digital-multimeter/) as a potential resource on Multimeters. We noticed you already reference the phrase on the following page: http://www.dansdata.com/io072.htm, so hopefully, it’d be an easy change on your end.

Link should look like this if possible:

I did some resistance measuring with my multimeter between the legs and got:

Once you’ve completed this task, if it’s not too much trouble, would you mind just sending a quick confirmation email? That way, I can mark your website off my action and follow-up list.

Thank you in advance for your support. If you have any questions, please let me know.

Luke Montgomery
SEO Specialist, Worldwide Marketing
Phone: 503.627.4672
www.tektronix.com

On the face of it, this is a normal link-spam e-mail. Your standard form letter - “I found your site, $SITENAME and wanted to thank you for providing such great information about $SCRAPED_SUBJECT…”, and then a request for a link from some random machine-detected page on the site - in this case, the question portion of this letter.

But this link-spam’s an odd one, because tek.com really is the Web site for Tektronix, who really are a big name in test and measurement gear - they’re possibly the biggest name in oscilloscopes, just as Fluke are the biggest name in multimeters.

(And now, thanks to Wikipedia, I know that Fluke and Tektronix are today both subsidiaries of the same corporation!)

Tektronix.com redirects to tek.com, and they’re not even trying to get some Google juice for a new domain name; tek.com and tektronix.com are similarly antiquitous.

If a human had bothered to look at the page they were asking me to link from, they probably would have noticed that such a link would only be appropriate if the multimeter being mentioned was a Tektronix product. Which, since the meter in question belongs to one of my readers, not me, I do not know. But I doubt it, because Tektronix multimeters are really nice and really expensive. The entry-level model on the page they want me to link to lists for $US750, and the top-of-the-line model is $US1350.

That’s too rich for my blood, so I couldn’t even validly link to the tek.com page from some use of the words “my multimeter” that was actually me talking about my multimeter. My good multimeter for formal dinners and meeting heads of state is…

…a Protek 506, here seen in the company of one of my random sub-$10 meters and my Micronta 22-195A, which was the very first multimeter I ever bought, when I was so young I still thought it was pretty cool to buy things at Tandy. (It still works. Might even still be accurate.)

So, to Luke Montgomery, SEO Specialist: Send me a Tektronix DMM4050 and I assure you that even though I’ll never use at least half of its features, I will link to any page you like the next time I refer to using it, without the tiresome nofollows I’ve put on all the links to your site above.

And, to Tektronix: Don’t do this. (Or pay an Experienced Organic Web Strategist like the windswept and interesting and possibly insomniac Luke Montgomery to do it for you.) It’s stupid.

If Tektronix made a general site about what multimeters are and what they do, then links of this sort, to that site, would be valid. Links to particular products from general terms are the opposite of informative, though. This one would be worthless to readers who already know about multimeters, and would either annoy or actively misinform readers who don’t already know about multimeters. It’s like asking someone to link some random mention of “my car” to BMW’s page for the current 5 Series.

Search engine optimisation can be perfectly valid - when, for instance, it makes it easier for people who want to buy the sort of thing you sell to find you.

Tell someone you’re in the “SEO” business, though, and they’ll probably assume you spend your days pursuing a higher Google PageRank by polluting the Web with misleading and useless information. And they will probably be right.

In conclusion, as regular readers will by now be expecting: Take it awaaaaay, Bill!

UPDATE: Luke Montgomery got back to me, with about the best response I think the laws of physics permit in this situation:

Okay I admit the email did seem a bit spammy. I realize you must receive a lot of spam/email/link-requests all the time so I just wanted to apologize. I send out emails all the time requesting links and I guess after I while I just get in a rut and start to sound like a robot. I am sorry for the spam, my intention was never to bother you. Your post made me realize how I was sounding and I’m sorry.

Luke

There may be hope for the boy yet!

A piquant little spamlet to ring in the new year:

To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: Ad Request…
From: Jami
Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2011 21:07:50 +0700 (ICT)

Good Day,

Our company is interested in placing the below employment ad with your Newspaper today. We want you to get back to us with the cost to run our ad= for 3 weeks in Newspaper and print.

OUR AD COPY AS TO BE PLACED:

WE ARE SEEKING DYNAMIC RECEPTIONIST ORIENTED INDIVIDUALS WITH GREAT COMMU
NICATIONS AND
TYPING SKILLS NEEDED TO WORK ON BEHALF OF COMPANY THIS SERVICE REPRESENTA
TIVE WILL EARN UP TO
$2000 MONTHLY ANY JOB EXPERIENCE NEEDED.EMAIL US AT: resume20111@hotmail
.com IF INTERESTED

Also, let me know if you do print category such as Yahoo Hot jobs, Monster,Carrier-builder OR ANY JOB SITE you have.Do you accept Visa or Master Credit Card, identify the type you accept.

I await the above quotation asap.

Best Regards,
Jami Erickson

I’ll be sure to pass this on to my Carrier-building friends, “Jami”! They’ll get back to you very soon about conventional versus nuclear power, aircraft complement and so on.

The only real question in my mind is whether this spammer and his how-dare-you-suggest-it-might-be-stolen credit card number is really trying to place these dodgy job ads, or whether it’s just another attempt to get suckers directly, by waiting for replies that say “actually I’m not a newspaper, but boy, that job sounds sweet!”

Could be both, I suppose. Either way, the jobs themselves will surely turn out to be the usual money-mule or “deposit this fake cheque and then send us some real money” sort of scam.

The “if you do print category” word-salad also reminds me of the odd use of the word “do” in many African spam-scams, such as the immortal “and if you do accept credit card“.

“Thesaurus spam” tries to avoid automated unsolicited-commercial-message detection by automatically replacing words in the spam text with “synonyms”. I put scare-quotes are around “synonyms” because thesaurus spam often fails to pick anything even close to a true synonym. So “we will fight them on the beaches” could, for instance, become “ourselves will affray them on the littoral”.

I hardly receive any thesaurus-spam via e-mail any more (largely because of upstream filtering; it’s probably still quite popular), but I do still see it. Most recently, in comments on this blog.

What happens is, a spammer comes along and creates a commenting account with a “Website” link to whatever site they want to spamvertise. Today, this was a commenter called “batterysea”, linking to www.uk-power-battery.co.uk. (All evidence of this commenter has now been erased, of course.)

Then the commenter goes into robospam mode. Instead of posting the usual robospam comments that say something like “Louis Vuitton Prada best replica fakes Rolex Viagra” et cetera et cetera, with links to a Web site from pretty much every word, they create an innocuous, linkless, plain-text comment. At a glance, the new spam-comment kind of looks as if it belongs on the page. That’s because it does kind of belong there, on account of being a copy of an earlier comment on the same page, but with the Thesaurus-O-Matic run over it to make the copying less obvious (and difficult, if not impossible, to auto-detect).

I’ve plucked a few of these ticks off the blog before, but this one this one managed to splatter a few more comments around before I stopped him, so I paid more attention. I presume these spammers try to strike a balance between getting a commercially useful amount of spam transmitted, without obviously producing tons of new comments that even a dozy admin is likely to notice. In the “batterysea” case, there were nine comments, posted at one-minute intervals on my nine most recent posts.

On this post, for instance, there’s a legitimate comment from Anne that says

Clearly I am culturally deprived - I don’t read magazines, I don’t watch TV, and I surf the web with adblock. So where would I see these ads?

Maybe a better question is, do these ads actually sell products? I mean, if I’m trying to decide on which fan to buy for my PC, is seeing an ad in a magazine actually going to affect my decision, whether the ad has giant robots or sober statistics?

And then, at the end of the page, along came the spammer to say

Clearly I am culturally beggared - I don’t apprehend magazines, I don’t watch TV, and I cream the web with adblock. So area would I see these ads?

Maybe a more good catechism is, do these ads absolutely advertise products? I mean, if I’m aggravating to adjudge on which fan to shop for for my PC, is seeing an ad in a annual absolutely activity to affect my decision, whether the ad has behemothic robots or abstaining statistics?

On this post, the spammer lifted just the second paragraph of my own comment, which started out

It’s possible that such a scheme would actually be legit, but it’s probable that it would not, because people sending money would have the implicit assumption that they were going to get something in return, even if it was as unlikely to be valuable as a lottery ticket.

That part became

It’s accessible that such a arrangement would absolutely be legit, but it’s apparent that it would not, because bodies sending money would accept the absolute acceptance that they were activity to get article in return, alike if it was as absurd to be admired as a action ticket.

…in the spam-comment.

When the robospammer can’t find any words to thesaurusise, it ends up just duplicating an existing comment. For instance, Fallingwater’s comment on this post:

The Asus EeePC 1005HA is, I think, the device that loses its rubber feet fastest than anything else that has been produced.

My solution: melt glue. Four puddles where the feet used to be have made my EeePC stick to surfaces again. Less than when it had the rubber feet, but a hell of a lot better than naked plastic.

…was duplicated word-for-word by the spammer.

This is a really feeble kind of spamming. All commenter Web-site links on this blog, and pretty much every other blog, are nofollowed, as are links in the comments themselves. So you don’t get search-engine prominence from this technique, and you don’t even get any traffic to speak of, unless human readers click on your commenter-name. I presume this happens even less often than people clicking on the links in the “Dolce Gabbana Dior bags Gucci handbags Chanel Hermes…” sorts of comments.

I think the only way to make comments that really look as if a human posted them would be by creating a spambot with something resembling real, “strong“, AI, like the burgeoning network-creatures in Maelstrom, the second of Peter Watts‘ excellent “Rifters” series (all three books of which are downloadable for free!).

In the meantime, we get aphasic thesaurus-robots, all that can be said for which is that they’re more successful than the robots that make hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds, of accounts called things like “aFZflRhBzRsYq <asdfwerj5@gmail.com>”, but never manage to post a single actual comment.

The pitter-pat of bogus PayPal money requests, from lazy thieves seeking obliging victims, continues.

I like this one.

Yep, this dude’s running an advance-fee scam. If I send him $US200, he’ll allow me to “collect [my] money”. Except, of course, there is no actual money. There never is.

What I particularly like about this version of the scam is its pared-down, minimalist nature. “Matt Arcay” never sent me an e-mail, or anything. Just this money request. I have received not the slightest hint of the amount or source of the promised “your money” - just this ridiculous “if you want to collect your money simply agree to this and send the money, so you can receive your money”.

(I don’t know where scammers learn that odd repetitive grammar that repeats because it is repetitive grammar and redundant and says the same thing over and over. I’ve received similar messages from different putative locations, like this guy allegedly from Puerto, I’m sorry, I mean PUERTO RICO.)

Perhaps Mr “Arcay” did e-mail me separately, of course, but that message was spam-filtered, so all I received was the accompanying money-request e-mail from PayPal.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the only way “Arcay” contacts prospective marks, though. If they reply asking what the deal is then he knows he’s got a live one.

What he really hopes for, though, is a mark who just sends him the $200 immediately. That’s probably because they reckon “Arcay” meant to send a ton of money to some other person but has accidentally picked the mark instead. So the mark wants to cash in before “Arcay” discovers his mistake.

In that case, “Arcay” has basically won the lottery. A cow like that probably has a lot more milk to give.

I don’t know whether it’s possible for a scammer in one of the classic famous-only-for-scams countries, like Nigeria or some other TPLAC, to open a PayPal account. This scammer could actually be in the USA - or “Arcay” could be a money-mule front man for a scammer in some other nation.

(There may be some way to report this blatant fraud to PayPal. I’m not eager to waste another morning trying to figure out how, though.)

Even if it’s tricky for people in developing nations to run a scam like this, there’s a huge incentive to do so. In urban Nigeria, many people don’t even make 60,000 naira per annum, which as I write this is only about $US400. A Nigerian who makes $US1200 a year is doing pretty well, so it’s hardly surprising that there’s so much enthusiasm about chopping that much and more out of some dumb Westerner’s giant wallet.

(The BBC’s recent three-part documentary “Welcome to Lagos” is, by the way, excellent.)

I do like a nice slab of spam in the morning.

From: "Alex P. @ expo-MAX" <alex@expo-max.com>
To: dan@dansdata.com
Date: 1 Dec 2009 10:56:37 -0600
Subject: Google Images search "walling's reservoir"

Hi there,

I came across your site while researching Google Images for keyword "walling's reservoir" and one of your pages (http://www.dansdata.com/phototute3.htm) was ranked on the 14th page of the Google Images search results.

I'm sure there are plenty of your other images in Google Image Search for many different keywords as well, it's just I came across this one first.

Really? You came across the FOURTEENTH PAGE of the search results... first?

(And, of course, my site deserved to be way down in the results for that search, because I have never written anything that has the slightest relevance to "Wallings Reservoir", which appears to be a place in Antigua. The closest I come to talking about it on that photo tutorial page is using the word "walling", as in "walling off", in one place on the page, and having this picture of a PC water-cooling reservoir somewhere else.

Oh, and note also that "Wallings Reservoir", the place in Antigua, has no apostrophe. More attention to detail from the good Alex P. at Expo-Max-dot-com!

Anyway, I looked through your site and correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like you are getting a lot of your visitors from image search, like Google Images, Yahoo Image Search, etc.

OK: You're wrong.

What if I told you that my team and I have developped a tool that reports on your site's rank (position) in all search engines for all keywords? Meaning, you know exactly where your site is ranked in Google, Yahoo, Google Images, Google News and so forth for each and every keyword.

Well, if you were to tell me such a thing, I'd say "I don't care. Get lost." It's lucky this is just a theoretical question, isn't it?

Alex's e-mail continued, with screenshots and stuff about what may actually be a perfectly good piece of free Web stats software. I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole, though, because of how idiotic this e-mail is.

And it's so close to being good. Good grammar, almost-immaculate spelling, clear presentation of the product, no hard sell... all let down by machine-generating a form-letter top section and not running it past a human to see if it's ridiculous.

D minus. Must try harder.

UPDATE: Thanks to the obscurity of Wallings Reservoir, this blog post is now on the first page of the search results!

I'm still way down the image-search results list, but I think this is still a search-engine optimisation result for Alex to be proud of.

Look what happened when he just told me about his service! Imagine what might happen if I actually used it!

From this morning’s mail:

To: “dan@dansdata.com”
Subject: Your Gambling Site
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:27:36 -0700
From: Mark Jubenville <mark.jubenville@neverfold.net>

Hello,
Recently I visited your website http://www.dansdata.com; while visiting your site I noticed that you link to http://www.quatloos.com at this address: http://www.dansdata.com/danletters036.htm. As we are closely related to them, I would love to exchange links with your website, currently there are about 5,000 - 7,000 people per day that goto my site and search for information, Therefore I would to link to an excellent site like yours.

I have taken the liberty of adding your site to my home page: http://www.neverfold.net?pg=Mz9ah. To determine if it is of any benefit to you, if you have a stats program you can check it and let me know. By looking at my stats, it looks like today I have sent you 37 visitors but it may change by the time you receive this email.

Some website owners do not like when other sites link to them so I thought I might ask first. I think the information on your website could be useful to my visitors; and maybe you could receive some extra relevant traffic if you want. Please get back to me when you have a chance to let me know if its ok to link to your website like this.

Have a good week,
Mark Jubenville
—————————————
email: mark.jubenville@neverfold.net
website: http://www.neverfold.net
Ref: Mz9ah

This email was sent to dan@dansdata.com, by mark.jubenville@neverfold.net
| 234, 5149 Country Hills Blvd N.W Suite # 306 | Calgary | Alberta | Canada

At first glance, this just looks like yet another schmuck who’s letting Acme AutoLinkSpam 2000 send e-mails for him, without bothering to actually look at what it’s saying on his behalf. Had Mr Jubenville (that is, just possibly, not his real name…) done so, he would have been able to see that my site, and Quatloos for that matter, have nothing whatsoever to do with his site, neverfold.net, which seems to be a discussion forum for poker players.

The hypothesis that he’s a bit new to this game is supported by the fact that there is indeed currently a link to dansdata.com on the neverfold.net home page; it’s above three links to sites that actually have something to do with poker. So this certainly doesn’t look like the usual link spammer, with a huge site whose countless pages contain nothing but endless unrelated links and Google ads.

But perhaps Mr Jubenville wants us to read between the lines, here. A link-spam that’s this random can’t just happen by accident!

I mean, lots of link spammers have found the word “chicken” on my site and thus decided that my whole site must be relevant to the page on their link-farm about aeronautical bird-strike. The word “poker” appears on two of dansdata.com’s more-than-a-thousand pages, as I write this, so there’s nothing out of the ordinary there.

But the page that Mr Jubenville says piqued his interest was one of my numerous letters columns - it’s the last letter on that page. That letter is about some nut who was selling purple aluminium that was supposed to have magical properties, which made him sound a bit like the Empower Modulator people. I linked to Quatloos because the guy selling the magic aluminium was connected to some other people with an interest in the proposed US “National Economic Stabilization and Recovery Act“, which has been kicking around for rather a while now, and is a favourite of some scam artists. And Quatloos have a page about it.

(We haven’t heard a lot from the NESARA scammers for a few years, but I bet they’ve gotten a considerable boost from the global financial crisis. The scam involves a “new Treasury Bank system, DEBT FORGIVENESS for all U.S. citizens, and abolishment of the IRS”, which almost sounds plausible these days. I highly recommend Quatloos overall, by the way, especially if someone is trying to talk you into a sure-fire can’t-lose money-making scheme having to do with legal loopholes which, to pick one common version, mean that nobody actually has to pay income tax.)

Clearly, nobody could really be stupid enough to think I have a “gambling site”, and also think that Quatloos’ page about the NESARA scammers is “closely related” to their site about poker.

Clearly, what Mr Jubenville is actually trying to tell me is that behind the apparently-valid message board, his site is actually some sort of great big scam!

Now, let’s read every 13th letter of every post on those poker forums…

I get a lot of link-farm spam, of varying levels of ingenuity.

This one’s got a new twist, though.

From: Alicia
[sending server located in some craphole]
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: An Idea/Suggestion for 404 link on http://www.dansdata.com/usbadapt.htm
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 08:10:42 -0600 (CST)

Hey :-)
I happened to noticed that on the page http://www.dansdata.com/usbadapt.htm you have an outgoing external link to http://www.archive.org/movies/movies.php, however I found that it is a broken link (doesn’t look like that page exists anymore or is temporarily down). I found this page to be a good replacement if you just wanted to change the link.
http://www.filmposters.com/articles/evolution-horror-movies.asp
Hopefully this adds another resource to your page if anything.

Hope this is of some help, thought it was a good site to reference. Hope it proves to be useful

Thanks,
Alicia

This really does look like an actual e-mail from a human being, doesn’t it?

Of course, a human being would probably have noticed that although the Internet Archive’s moving image collection page has moved since I wrote that review in 2004, the old URL redirects to the new one.

A human being might also be able to detect a slight difference in content between the place I was linking to and the place “Alicia” wanted me to link instead.

The Internet Archive moving image collection lets you download, for free, tons of movies that’re out of copyright or otherwise free to distribute. Nosferatu, His Girl Friday, Night of the Living Dead, Reefer Madness, old computer TV shows, cartoons, vintage educational films, “ephemeral” films; you name it. It’s great.

Filmposters.com, in contrast, is pretty much what you’d expect filmposters.com to be. The page “Alicia” wanted me to link to isn’t the usual meaningless link-farm robo-content, though; it’s about “The Evolution of Horror Movies”, and seems to be a perfectly valid page with real content. But it also seems to not be in the Google database at all, which suggests that it’s brand new.

Perhaps the idea behind this spam is to make actual valid content pages on sites that want the PageRank boost that all link schemes are about. Then you scan for broken links on Web sites and shoot off these seemingly-from-a-human e-mails, suggesting people update their link to point to your page.

The only problem is that, as usual, it’s all based on software that’s trying, unsuccessfully, to find targets that’re relevant to the stuff the spammer is trying to advertise.

If this really is the scheme, it’s a step forward from normal link-farm sites, which exist only to trick searchers into clicking on ads. But I’m still not going to help “Alicia” do it.

Presented as received, emphasis theirs:

From: “rachel” <rachel@infronts.com>>
To: <dan@dansdata.com>
Subject:
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2009 01:39:08 +0800

Dear Dan,

Have a nice day£¡

I am happy to present hot selling items for you reference. A lot of clients are interesting in this item, so I try to send them for your reference. Hope it is helpful for you!

Here is our Solar USB Dick for your reference,hope you are interexted in.

Feature:Animation Display
Operating sysrem:Windows 98/SE, Windows ME, 2000 XP and Mac OS9.1
Drivers: Only Windows 98/SE need the driver

Logo is made by Pc software and displayed on LCD screen, when there is light logo blink thus to attract people’s attention.

[blah blah blah, picture of USB thumb-drives with a solar-powered capacity-display thing on the side]

Pirce: FOB shenzhen

500PCS
128MB USD3.15
256MB USD3.45
512MB USD3.75
1GB USD4.25
2GB USD4.65
4GB USD7.60

MOQ:500pcs , More qty will be more cheaper.
Product material: Plastic Housing
Product size: 62*25*13mm
Packing: each in a color box,100pcs/48*36*29cm; G.W./N.W.:12.5*11.7

This offer is firm for 1 week.
Please add USD0.30 for ROHS.
Printing logo: logo set up charge: USD100.00/design.
Sample delivery time is 3-5 day after order confirm.
Delivery time: 7-10 day after sample approval.

Should any of the items be of interest to you, please let us know. We shall be glad to give you our lowest quotations upon receipt of your detailed requirement.

Rachel
IFS electronice company limited

Web:www.infronts.com

Yep, that’s an electronice solar dick all right.

(I bet they’ll print whatever famous computer-product-company logo you like on your 500 solar dicks.)

There’s an “Ask Dan” button on all of Aus PC Market product pages, that allows people to ask me stuff about AusPC products, in the hope that I may perhaps answer them and then put the correspondence on my site as an Ask Dan page.

We haven’t been able to make it completely clear that this feature is for people asking, for instance, whether Video Card A or Video Card B is better for Fallout 3, rather than stuff I don’t know like how long something’s power cord is. But even without a How Not To E-Mail Me scare page, by and large the Ask Dan buttons work quite well.

In the last few days, some spambot has latched onto Ask Dan. It’s clearly mistaken the send-me-an-e-mail form for a Web-forum comment form, and is attempting to use it to post comment spam.

So now I’m getting mail from sukmishelpfs@yahoo.com and lcfwasolzg@gmail.com and so on that says stuff like

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or

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(The above is quite heavily abridged.)

The funny part is that the spambot has decided to post its mis-aimed comments in the Ask Dan form for exactly one AusPC listing, for this defunct server. Because that product is no longer available, the product page now has no Ask Dan button on it; there is no way for anybody to actually navigate to that product’s Ask Dan form. And yet, the spambot keeps Asking Dan about it!

So somehow it’s gotten it into its tiny little brain that the Ask Dan page for that product - URL http://www.auspcmarket.com.au/popup/email_dan.php?product_code=SY-CSPC-7045A-TB, which I just created by pasting the server’s product ID in place of the ID of another product - is the gateway to bold new markets for online casinos and pills that probably aren’t Viagra.

I hope it doesn’t discover any of the thousands of other Ask Dan forms. It’s much easier to filter this way!

From: “Bao Nguyen” <mfiat@examnotes.net>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:39:25 +0200
To: “Dan” <dan@dansdata.com>
Subject: Heroin (DISCOUNT 25% IF GET 0,5 Kilo)

Online Store

Hello, we sell some drugs :

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- Crack and Cocaine

- - MDMA (Ecstasy)

- Hallucinogens: LSD, Peyote, Psilocybin, and PCP

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- Prescription and Over-the-Counter Medications (FREE SHIPPING !)

- Methylphenidate and Amphetamines (ADHD Medications) - BUY 2 GET 3 !

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Contact E-Mail: nengers@aol.com

I presume these spammers just wait for someone to be dumb enough to actually order illegal drugs from them, then keep the money.

What are you going to do, complain to Western Union that your half-kilo of heroin never showed up?