spambots again

[altenbach]

User wesleycheek is a spammer;

Modus operandi: Create new accounts and post a few things that are exact duplicates of existing posts by others to look legitimate and gain reputation as longtime user before beginning to spam. Here is the groundwork.

This post is an exact duplicate of this post by Phil_.

This post is an exact duplicate of this post by labviewlearner

This post is an exact duplicate of this post by RobertoBezzolo

OK, now that we look like a regular participant, we wait two months, then start spamming a link to a website, assuming that new users get more scrutiny. He probably seeded many forums with similar new user accounts.

post one

Post two

... probably more to come. Account and all posts should be deleted.

Keep your eyes open!

[tst]

It could be worse...

Also, recently there were several posts of barcode reading software spam both here and on LAVA, where they create a few users who are supposed to appear random and then each user posts a response in a relevant discussion which actually leads to a different site than the other responses (the sites have similar designs, but they're not identical). The sites also seem to actually give real software, which is available in an evaluation mode and then you have to pay for it after a while. By now both NI and LAVA seem to have deleted all of the posts but this one - http://lavag.org/topic/16964-barcode-decoder-by-using-labview/?p=104236

[altenbach]

These crooks are paid pennies for all links that stay up for a certain amount of time, so it is important that they are removed on sight to discourage the abuse of the NI forums. Things just got cleaned up. Good!

[tst]

Here's another one - http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Audio-Files-Transcription/m-p/2499724#M761885

I suspect the entire thread is spam. The (new) poster asks the same question here and in another thread (it doesn't even mention LV) and then two other new users miraculously appear in both threads to provide links to the same paid service.

[altenbach]

Same exchange also here in this old thread. The link has nothing do do with programming, but is a human translation service.

[altenbach]

Now we have this guy....

Four spam posts in four minutes. Hopefully the forum protection will kick in soon. 😄

More coming in as we speak. He even added a tag!

He is also slightly mutating the post titles to avoid duplicate detection.

[ngarneski]

They seem pretty sophisticated actually, replying to one another. They even search for relevant threads to necro. See this: http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/How-to-convert-a-audio-file-to-text-file/m-p/134780 At least they are well done. 

[LV_Pro]

Wow, just looked at this post after two weeks of travel and immediately two three new spam posts showed up in the breakpoint!

[thoult]

Both BreakPoint and LabVIEW boards spammed heavily this morning. Think I've reported them all - although I could have left it at one and pointed out that any additional posts were spam:

[thoult]

And it's still going. One every minutes or two at the moment.

Edit - actually, two users.

fgfhgfghfgh

Date Registered	‎11-20-201301:42 AM
Date Last Visited	‎11-20-201302:24 AM
Total Messages Posted	29

That's one post every 90 seconds, with the title and content incrementing an ASCII character in each.

sunainasingh01

Date Registered	‎11-20-201312:41 AM
Date Last Visited	‎11-20-201301:35 AM
Total Messages Posted	5

Rather disappointingly, this one's been very lax in his output.