Spam On Lie

I must be big in the Far East. I keep finding comments in Chinese on my posts - normally followed by a number of periods - each one being a link to some site that likely sells pornography, cut-rate pharmaceuticals or knock-offs, designer goods or stolen property (wonder if I could get a hot new phone that way...).

If I've heard once, I've heard a million times that comment spam and similar stuff persists because it's so cheap. You fire up your automated Blogspot 'Bot, and have it create a few dozen accounts, and then have it simply crawl around to various weblogs and create some random comment filled with links that you hope that some complete idiot encounters and clicks on. And that's the part that confuses me. I get the comment spam that I tend to see on more commercial sites, like newspapers or more formalized weblogs and commentaries that makes no effort to hide the fact that they're selling something. While this up-front approach makes them easy to ignore, you might actually find someone who wants a knock-off Coach bag, and thinks that embedding an advertisement in the comments section of a news story about a quadruple-homicide is a clever marketing scheme. Hey - it could happen.

But who, realistically, is going to click on some random link embedded in some random dot at the end of some random comment on some random posting on some random weblog, and hope for the best? I mean, yeah, it's cheap, so cheap in fact that you only need one hit in a few hundred to make some small profit for your efforts, but do people really even get that? And if you're simply pushing malware, don't you still need something that a potential target with half the sense that dogs gave to cabbage would actually click on? "Hey, look, I found a link to SomeSexSite.com on a blog posting, cleverly disguised as a blue period! This must be my lucky day!" Trust me, anyone that dim likely doesn't have any room left for your malware on his computer.