The wowgoldworld.com network

Dang it. I was just going to report splogs of known networks and then I turned up something different. Unlike the wowgoldsale.com network, I'm not entirely sure what the main site in this spamdexing scheme is. I just picked out one for the title. :P They've had splogs in the past, but most of them are pretty old. They just comment spam a lot, hitting unrelated blogs, wikis, and forums.

I submitted about 25 URIs from this network to URIBL after checking them out.

Current top splog user names

I know I mentioned these in another post, but the patterns are so noticeable now that I'm giving this its own entry. Once again, I'm not saying every user with these names is a spammer, but I've found all of these user names on splogs lately and it's a good way to start checking. I'm also including the FFXI stuff since there seems to be a connection. I'm breaking this into two lists based on names I've found a lot versus names I've found several times but not as often.

Most Common:

• buywowgold
  
• cheapwowgold
  
• ffxigil
  
• ffigilgold
  
• googlewow
  
• lovewow
  
• nicewow
  
• sellwowgold
  
• wowgame
  
• wowgamegold
  
• wowgoldse
  
• wownice

Others:

• buywarcraftgold
  
• cheapffxigilgold
  
• cheapwarcraftgold
• gwowgold
  
• sellwarcraftgold
  
• warcraftgold
  
• wowgoldwow
  
• wowwownice

The standard "wowgold" is also sometimes used but is surprisingly less common. I've found duplicate versions of the same information under that account name on a few servers, but in those cases, there hasn't been an update since 2005 and there are no distinctive links to other places, so I'm leaving it alone. Obviously, there are other user names in use, but I haven't seen them very often yet.

It's funny, but it seems I'm expecting way too much creativity from this stuff. I figured any minute, they'd run out of wowgold names and resort to stupid names like, say, "wowpreciousmetal" or at the very least, stuff like "w0wg0ld" but no, the trend is tacking on extra "wow"s.

Sept. 12 2006: Added some more user names and did some sorting.

Catch some splogs yourself!

OK, I guess I'll throw in one more update.

Searching for articles that are often reproduced in splogs will turn up a lot more splogs. Not every web site with these articles is a splog, of course, since some of them are actually the source of the article. However, if the text is on a blog host, there's a good chance it's a splog. Checking dates is usually a good thing to do. One of the articles being posted to splogs is a review from 2004. Nothing fishy about that!

I'm going to post links to search results but I'm not going to mention the phrases here.

A lot of wowgold blogs can be turned up with the phrase found on the Google site on this linkand FFXI spam blogs are turned up with this one.

My investigating the extent of networks like this is meant to be more of an example or exercise than anything. My hope is that people will be able to identify patterns such as these with different types of comment spam. Even when they do the copied and pasted political mumbo-jumbo, those articles can usually be turned up on splogs as well.

Don't hesitate to report splogs you find to their respective bloghosts. You might also want to use the bookmarklet provided by SplogSpot so things can be entered into their database.

Edit: Changed the wowgold spam phrase to something shorter and sillier that seems to show up on wowgold-sale.com blogs in particular.

URIBL listings

I've entered a great deal of my findings regarding wowgold-sale.com into the uribl.com blacklist. There were 50 something URIs that I collected. I thank them for putting up with my long, long lists. You can find a lot of other wowgold sites to watch out for in there, too.

This will probably be the last of my consistent updates for the week or so. That was pretty overwhelming.

Reporting Splogs

Wow. wowgold-sale.com has been hitting the free blog systems like nuts and leaving trails. Anyway, in most cases, their usernames of the moment seem to be googlewow, lovewow, nicewow, wowgame, and wownice since their "wowgold" blogs are already shut down. There are also variations such as nicewow001.

Now, I'm by no means saying every user on every blog system going by those names is a spammer. There are just a lot of users like that. I don't do any reporting without checking the content. That's why I'm not sure just how long I plan on doing this.

My real hope is that now that I've got some fairly useful information together, other people can find and report these particular splogs. It would also be good if hosts could recognize these trends as well.

First "splogs" now..."spikis?"

I've been tracking one group that seems to like to set up blogs on various free blogging sites and they're easy to track down and report because they include links to their various sites with every post. Aw, isn't that nice of them?

Now I'm noticing wikis with particularly fishy links in them. No, I'm not talking about spam in wikis but rather wikis intended to be nothing but spam set up on services such as pbwiki.com, wikispaces.com, jot.com and stikipad.com I'm not going to post the links to the wikis themselves because hopefully they'll be gone soon.

It's just that I'm trying to figure out what the heck a spam wiki is called. A spam blog is a "splog." Is a spam wiki a "spiki?" A "spwiki?" Ug. Anyway, most of these services have systems in place so that the content of individual wikis can be controlled only by people the wiki owner has authorized. Otherwise, well, I'm afraid I might do something crazy and just edit the entry so it points out that the owners are no good spammers. However, that's just the sort of action I don't want to take, so I guess I'll jut be glad I can't and report the information to the wiki hosts.

OK, yes, last post for the night, I promise. Just wanted to get those findings out.

Sorry about turning comments off, but I'm too busy tracking down comments on other sites to pay attention to comments here. I've completely lost my mind, I'm afraid.

The wowgold-sale.com network

While analyzing some of the wowgold spam that other sites have received, I noticed a pattern: there are a lot of sites that link to wowgold-sale.com. Other sites often linked to within those sites are power-levels.com and ffxi-sale.com. I could post an entire list of these sites, but since they don't always stay active for very long, it probably won't serve much of a purpose. I've already reported lists to Google, but posting them here would be kind of...well...spammy, I think. Plus, when they post these massive URL links, the above mentioned links are typically in there, sometimes with subdomains tacked on, so they're easy to spot.

If you search for wowgold on Google, wowgold-sale.com is currently the top result. It seems their dirty tricks are working.

Edit: Fixed the Google link. Plus, I feel like noting that wowgold-sale.com has dropped down to the #5 result. sale-wowgold.com is #4, a spam wiki is #3, and a splog is #2.

Welcome!

I'm not an expert on comment spam. I just really hate it. There's one type that really annoys the heck out of me, though, that's advertising for "wowgold." It's so dang annoying because nobody is safe from it. Not celebrities. Not even guestbooks on 9/11 memorial sites. (Second link goes to a screen cap of the site I took that's hosted on a free image host because I'm running this blog independent of any of my other sites. The spammed site seems to have a lot of spam, so maybe it'll be buried by other stuff at some point. )

The thing that's so strange about this type of spam is that, to the best of my knowledge, it doesn't appear in e-mails. I've done some investigating on it mainly thanks to Google and am taking such measures as reporting sites with AdSense ads to them as well as informing third party companies who offer services that the spammers utilize.

I don't think I'll make a real impact on this type of spam. I'm nor launching any sort of attacks. My main intent is to report some of my findings and I'm using a blog as it's a fairly simple organization system.

I don't know how long I'll keep this project going. I'm not on some sort of super crusade against this stuff. I'm mainly just curious about where it comes from and maybe some of you are, too.

Additionally, I'm not asking for examples of this spam from users. I'm not going to branch out to other types, either, since this is just some loony project I'm doing. I do report other types of spam I find in addition to this type, I'm just not going to talk much about it.

So...enjoy. I guess.