I participate in a number of forums. Of of them has what appears to be no moderation and constant spam about CBD and other products. The spammers create new names and post in the hopes the messages get into Google, thus getting free advertising.
Yes, I know there SHOULD be moderators, but there are not as that company is being sold. The new owners will definitely moderate the forum, but as I say some forums don’t do that.
Since member users can’t delete the messages, I wonder if replying to the messages would help. Things like “My Sister tried your product and is now in the hospital”. That too would get into Google. The only problem is that the original company could theoretically come back and sue you if they lost business, but it would certainly feel good until that time. Hiring spammers to promote a questionable product is not the best advertising.
Here in this forum we don’t have that issue, thank goodness.
At the start of COVID I bought a case of Spam (8 cans) in case of supply-chain issues and they remain unopened. Not all people in Hawaii eat Spam. However, for those who do, I’ll donate them to the local food bank.
Our COSTCO has Spam and a lot of local items like local coffee, honey, cookies and products containing seaweed
Everytime I see fish or seaweed I am reminded of the song. You know… “If you knew Sushi
like I know Sushi, Oh!, Oh!, Oh! What a girl!”
My mom was not a very good cook [running joke in the family for years] but she knew about ten ways to cook Spam and we had them all – over and over and over.
Email is essentually free for spammers. Imagine if the sender had to deposit money before emailing. Then if the recipient marked the email as spam, it cost the sender. The more emails marked as spam, the less deposit is left. This costs the sender for each spam message but does not cost valid senders.
A.I. is being used to scan messages and determine if they are spam.
Years ago there were beacons and hidden links on websites. Humans could not see them but if you looked at the source code you could see that a link to a website had underlining off, the text was the same color as the background, thus invisable.
If I was training A.I. I would look at links in emails, check the date the domain was created and flag things that were odd. A few years ago I found a local office of (I think it was a Social Security office) and they had a toll free number that began 866. Common sense says that a long time government agency woudl have an 800 number as toll frees started with 800, then 888, then 877 and later still 866, etc. This meant that the number was recently assigned. It turns out that it was a correct number, but before I verified that I was very cautious.
In my emails I have found that many of the spams listed a LIST-ID number that I could search for and immediately delete those emails.
Google is using AI to eliminate much more spam. earch for “Google email AI spam”
