Why do Spammers Join?
 

I have maybe a very stupid question....Why do spammers join my forum, and not post. They often don't place anything in their signature either. What purpose does this serve?

I've had over 250 new users from the same IP address, have since banned that address. But no posts, nothing. No odd signatures etc.

Any thoughts? Just curious on the reasoning.

Also nothing in their profile info (homepage, ICQ/MSN, etc..)?

It can also be that many accounts are prepaired and left alone for a while to make the account "older". Then after some time you have a sudden wave of spam by previous registered members.

You probably have a spammer with a broken script/bot. His script/bot is probably trying to post but can't for some reason. Just be glad you didn't have any post with viagra, etc.

Or they never are able to complete the email verification. Or just want their name indexed on as many sites as possible.

They will be back. It might be 2 weeks, it might be 2 months, but they will be back to post some spam. On my wifes forum, one spammer came back over 2 months after the account was created.

I often wonder if those bots go through an account creation phase - where they will sign up on thousands of forums. Then, a few days, weeks or months later they will go back and start posting. Maybe the accounts are sold to other spammers?

The bots sometimes contain info with them... like automaitcally adding some type of name in the usernamr or sig.

you know what I want to know? where do these people come from? who are they? where do they get the tools to do what they are doing?

Its something you never really hear about, people just seem to accept that there are mysterous users who spam stuff, for seemingly no real reason.

for that matter, does anyone actually click on the spam? have people fallen for this? is there someone actually selling viagra/phones/etc cheap that won't just take your money?

questions questions...... spam blows my mind. it really does.