Yet Another Spam Scam

[vijayninel]

Hi,

I have noticed a new form of spam/scam running on some forums nowadays and just thought that I'd let you know about it.

This is a human operated scam. First the scammer will register as a regular member on your forums and make what appear to be legit posts. The scammer will usually make multiple accounts and will also reply to his own posts.

After this the scammer will send the following message to select members of your forums either by PM of e-mail if they have chosen to receive e-mails from other members.

The message goes something like this:

Hello Username，

As a lurker on this forum, I?ve noticed you are one of the most active users on this site. And it?s good to see that, since this forum exists because of users like you

I am currently contacting you on behalf of {removed}, a subsidiary of {removed} that sells lots and lots of crazy gadgets internationally. As {removed} is a relatively new site (having launched earlier this year), we are currently trying to spread the word about the site and its products.

We?d like to send you some free products to play with and to review, with no strings attached. If you like them and are willing to share your opinions of the products on this forum, it would be great, but if you think that our products suck and don?t want anything to do with us anymore, we will also understand (? maybe ).

If you are interested, we currently have two options for sending out the products to you:

1) Simply visit {removed} and let us know what products you are interested in! Unfortunately, as we are a company with a budget, we can only offer you up to US$50 worth of products.

2) We know that going through all our products (all 10,000 of them) to find what interests you, may take more time than you?re willing to invest in our site. In this case, simply let us know and we can select a range of products that we believe will interest you based on the topics you cover on your website.

With either option, we will still need the following information:
- Your Name
- Your Shipping Address (Including Country)
- Your Contact Phone Number

Regardless of your decision, we?d love to hear back from you! (Hopefully you don?t think we?re a scam?)

If you?d like to know more about us, you can also find us on Facebook {removed} or our (extremely new) twitter account {removed}.

Thank you for your time!

Scammer

This spam is different from the usual "iPhone 5 for $200" spam. It is more thought out and carefully designed to bypass forum anti-spam protection and fool gullible members.

However this is a scam and these pms/emails are spam. If you get indications that this is going on in your forum then ban the member immediately and warn your members to stay away from this scammer.

You'd have to be pretty dumb to fall for that

[BirdOPrey5]

Why is this a scam? The address and phone number for my LLC is public record anyway and in my site's TOS- what harm would there be in giving that to them? Obviously if they come back and ask for money that's a problem, but if they want to send some free products in hopes you post favorable reviews? That's just business.

[Digital Jedi]

Seems more annoying than anything else.

[AFemaleProdigy]

They also do all of the first steps just to get past any spam/scam prevention measures you may have set up. Making initial legitimate posts helps the spammer get past things like user promotions intended to stop scammers from posting garbage right off the bat. I personally have my websites set up with promotions to stop scammers from being able to immediately post spam by forcing x number of valid and approved posts before allowing any urls or use of the private messaging system.