[Announcement] Regarding Spam/Scam/Phishing Threads

Discussion
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Every week, we have to delete lots of spammers, trying to post some advertisement to some shady to-be-avoided website. 95% of those spammers are never seen by you, because the anti-spam system detects them successfully and lets us delete their threads, before they become visible to anyone, but moderators.
Las weekend for example, there was a burst of an entire squad of new spam accounts. Luckily, we were able to delete all the accounts and threads, before they were posted.

So, most of the time you don’t notice this is happening. However, from time to time, some slip through the system and the thread becomes visible, anyway.

When that happens, I am quite disappointed to see, that, even if the thread is only open for a very short time, the spam links have already been clicked! Why? Why would you do that?

You are making yourself an involuntary accomplice to the scammer!

If you give them traffic, they know that and will continue to spam our forum. The more they will do this, the more will slip through. The more will slip through, the more traffic they get and now repeat this devious cycle.

Please, do not click on links, which look like spam.

FAQ: How to detect if a post is spam?

  1. Check the thread’s author.
    a. Does it say, he just joined today?
    b. Does he have only less than a minute read time?
    c. Did he post only a single post having a link in it pointing to a shady website?
    d. Does the name sound like one from a name generator? Like e.g. “John Smith” or “James Riley”.
  2. Check the thread’s purpose.
    a. Does it look like the thread tries to make it seem like it is informing you, when in fact it’s just talking about a “service”, “offering”, “product” or whatever you should pay for?
    b. Is it written like an advertisement in ANY way?
    c. Is the link hidden behind text? This makes it harder to check where the link points to.

  3. NEVER CLICK ON LINKS POSTED BY NEWCOMERS WHO MIGHT SEEM ADVERTISING.

If you are still unsure, if it’s a spammer, then just don’t click it. There is usually no reason to hide a link to ubuntuforums or whatever for normal people. However, every single spammer hides their link behind a short sentence, so it’s harder to see which shady website is hidden behind that linked word.

6 Likes
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I’ll post some examples of how it looks for moderators, when spammers try to do their thing.

The following two are prime examples for how spam posts look. They usually look more or less the same.

2022-03-11 17_29_39-Window

The first one got through registration, but their entire post is just a hidden link. That’s it. So, it’s obvious there is something wrong with that thread.

2022-03-11 17_30_03-Window
2022-03-11 17_30_03-Window694×290 13.9 KB

The second one did not get through registration, because their entire biography section + provided website are just spam advertisement. Additionallly, notice how their e-mail address does not match the name provided on this website. This is also a common feature. Plus, what a surprise, they also use a hidden link in their biography, which is the same as the provided website on their profile. They (almost) always use hidden links.

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Sorry, I am guilty. It looked like an advert, out of nosiness/curiosity i looked at it. Yuk!!
Thanks for your advice, i won’t again

1 Like
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Also worth pointing out the buttons at the bottom of threads, and in the ‘show more’ menu at the bottom of each post that can flag a post as suspect and draw the moderator’s attention to it… So as Akito requests, don’t click on links in suspect posts, but also FLAG them so that they can be handled as quickly as possible…

I’ve been a mod on other boards and in my experience it really helps when users flag suspect posts as it makes sure we see them…

ex-Gooserider

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ASKING anyway…

If DuckDuckGo (in Beta) has a way of APP tracking Protection and Blocking, is there no way to see this come to Linux? Apparently, the apps we use (i.e. Lowe’s) have hidden tracking companies-advertisers within. They are accessing private info on us, could this be apart of the cause/effect?
Outside the Box?
BTW: I am onto; research and read up on my own question!