Ogre Forums

Hi, just received this spam as a private message from a Johny.

Hello scanmaster_k!


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You can request for payment once youre account balance is at least $10.00. Your payment will be processed and issued via AlertPay or Bux.to card within 30 business days for premium and 60 business days for standard members. You can only request one payment at the time. Right now they only supports these two (above mentioned) payment systems.

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One good thing for webmasters is that they can convert their earnings to advertise on Bux.to website and get some quality visitors completely for free. In other way you can easily cashout your account balance and take money. This is great way to earn money easily on internet, specially if you can attract referrals through your link. You can see live example on above account details.

Just thought I would let someone know, in case it can be blocked or something.



Scanmaster_K

Hmm, I have just disabled PM for a user named kakahehe. I'll see to it.

I also received one from maniek.

Johny and maniek blocked too. This problem will be discussed. Anymore people having problems with this from other users?

Lots of people are reporting these, so far reported:

orzeszek
Johny
maniek
kakahehe

All are from Poland by the looks of it. I've removed all their accounts and am banning the Polish freemail providers they were using. Looks like Poland is now the new Russia for spammer-friendly email providers.

Any more, please post in this thread rather than PM'ing me

I should add that I received a similar PM message on another forum yesterday... I think they use IPB.

I wonder if this is new PHP vulnerability.

Ditto, please ban this guy.

incidenta5 wrote:Ditto, please ban this guy.

The posts above don't identify a user - if you have had any spam posts from anyone else not in that list, tell me what their account name is. The notification email doesn't say.

And please, no-one else PM or email me about spam or missing messages when you go to your inbox (they're gone because the user is gone)

Thanks for taking time to answer.

Hmm, another bux.to PM spam from user kamila12 ...

received that spam from inotal

More bannings:

inotal
kamila12

Please don't PM / email me about this, use this thread, I'm getting secondary spam here

From kamila12

kamila12 wrote:Hello billrobertson42!
SPAM SPAM SPAM

haffax: edited message so to not link to the spam site.

Already banned.

i think banning those users won't do much since it might be auto-generated due to some security hole in phpBB2?

sinbad wrote:More bannings:

inotal
kamila12

Please don't PM / email me about this, use this thread, I'm getting secondary spam here

Sorry for spamming you, and thank you for banning inotal

frooze, it can't hurt banning them, so they don't have any accounts they can fall back to when the exploit has been fixed...

Couldn't there be some sort of plugin to forbid PMing other users with their post count below 10? Sure it would hurt the legit people but would stop all of the spammers.

mailmy

he did it to me...

Hey all,

your problem is that either your domain has found itself on a white list or been crawled from a search engine by a spam bot.
The purpose of PM spam is that it takes admins a lot longer to identify there is a spam problem in most cases.

These bots get about 300k new domains a day parsed from multiple search engines, using a proxy network of about the same size, it's one heck of a problem for google.
Hence the over reactive at times spam page.
But not only that there are white lists of new forums released on many site's, some show 1 Million new forums a week.

The problem is in the maths, if you can get about $1 CPM (Per 1000) Banner add's, or from CPC.
And with some tricks and the right ad provider thats fairly low.

Spamming 1000,000 forums in a month that generate just 10 unique hits nets you $10,000, nice huh?

And there are many porn & other affiliates they use to generate there money too.
Of course, they use a number of methods to stop the ad providers knowing where the traffic is coming from, such as making you redirect on the main sites or a middleman site, erasing the refferer your browser passes..

If the ad company's check the page out, it looks like a normal refferal page, but from the spam link they get something else.

It's all down to numbers, an average of 10% reply to phishing emails for passwords and bank information.
Around 60% of people are said to click a spam link via a forum PM, email or spam post rather than ignore it.

It's big money for an automated process, and to many people can't resist it.
The captcha you have atm is easy, the background is lighter and letters can be picked out with no problems at all.
But even if it wasn't, its a plain unmodified font, and even if it was like some captchas, a neural network could still read it if a smart person made it.

My advice, and I'm fluent in PHP & html is to play with the registration forum on here.

You can tell a new user to leave some fields blank, and if on submission there not blank, fail the process.
Or rename the user and email fields in the html forum. and if the email field contains an email, it's likely a bot.

But this would only get the automated bot's, and some are trained to spot these tricks, and a person can be notified and pass the forum manually.
Many bot's read the text before a field and know if it differs from default.

A custom question may also go down well, but not a simple maths one, as they have been cracked long ago.

I would recommend a 10 posts min filter for PM, but then they may start with spam posts of porn etc.

if you need my help just PM me.

I was feeling left out - karabinerka just sent me the Bux.to message. Can you ban him?

Received one from mailmy

gideon wrote:Received one from mailmy

ditto

gideon wrote:Received one from mailmy

yep,
received it here as well

mailmy spammed me too... I guess there are a few ways to combat these PM spams:

1) Only allow people with at least X number of posts to send private messages. So if they wanted to do the PM spam they would first need to spam the main boards which would easily be visible to the admins.

2) Some forum software allows users to report private message abuse directly with a button. This makes it easier to deal with them.