I may have uncovered a new scam (new to me, at least). It consists of a rapid-fire spidering plus a concentrated google bombing with the intention of getting people to access a site for investment purposes. How they invest or how it works after that, I really don’t know and don’t intend to find out myself. I would guess the returns for the “investors” turn out to be much less than they anticipate, to say the least. :rolleyes:
How it works is this. A robot program accumulates vast lists of message boards, registers on them, then posts new threads with just a few text blocks such as “Amazing site! I got 130% back in 2 days”, and a link. Why message boards, I dunno, but it seems limited to just those.
Next, it google-bombs the message boards so that all searches for the URL turn up the links it just created. All refs are positive (albeit boringly similar).
Then, after harvesting the chumps, it changes domain pointers, nameservers, or whatever, and does it again, only hours or days apart.
Example: goldnovember.com. A google search showed the first 200 references as positive, with about four different sets of text, all copied from the site’s same first page. All refs are to message boards (at least the first 200; I didn’t look further). A check with whois showed a NJ registration, but enough links look Russian to make me think this is a front. Whois showed that the domain data had changed 13 times in the last 13 days.
I’m glad Google is sticking to their guns for the moment, but I think they are eventually going to be forced to change their code to stop Googlebombing. It’s becoming too exploitable.
The OP explains how they attempt to build credibility for their scam, but not what the actual money making part of the scam is. I see now that it’s some investment thing. Let me get my credit card.
If I understood anything in the OP, I’d know what to look for. “Rapid-fire spidering?” “Concentrated google bombing?” Next I’ll be hearing about “multi-dose nail driving” or “colorless green worms sleeping furiously.” THEN I’ll be scared.
Incidentally, the FAQ explains that you can’t withdraw your principal, and that there is risk involved. So whatever you give them is theirs to keep, and you may or may not earn interest. At least it’s an honest scam!
True, true. I certainly didn’t want to send them some money to find out, but I’m pretty sure the “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” applies here.
We have detected a problem with your credit card from strange activity on your account. Please send your card number, full address, name, PIN, SSN, PDQ and favorite color to my email addy and I’ll fix it for you.
Meanwhile, although this particular scheme looks like an investment plan today, I see no reason why the same tactics couldn’t be applied to almost anything tomorrow. And I suspect they are, as I have been noticing similar activity on a message board I administer for a long time and have had a hard time figuring out just WTF is going on.
Not much more than intuition. As I mentioned earlier, I have been watching this kind of activity on my MB – I suspect SDMB is immune due to the registration fee – and a large percentage of the registrations are either obviously from Russia (.ru domains) or less-obviously from Russia (more veiled references to .ru and garbled English).
That may break ground for a new definition of “honest”.
Tell ya what, comrade. Why don’t you invest a few bucks and see what happens? Shouldn’t take long. If you consistently get 130% return every 2 days over a few weeks, I’ll retract my accusations.
And you will owe me a beer for making you rich in no time.
Sorry if those terms are obscure. “Rapid-fire spidering”: Rapid-fire would be a term for “fast”. Spidering is what a search engine does – starting with a list of URLs, a robot program looks for other links inside each URL, then goes to the link and finds more links, etc., making a giant list of victims to be used later. In this case, it seems to concentrate on message boards exclusively.
“Google-bombing”: I confess I don’t know all the details, but it is a way of fooling search engines into thinking that your site is popular and significant. It does this by creating fake sites just for the purpose of access by a search engine. Google assigns a ranking for each URL based partly on how many other URLs link to it, so if you can create an entire fake web “universe” of self-referential sites, google is fooled into thinking that your site is super-popular and puts it at the top of the list.
This particular scheme requires speed before the perpetrators can be tagged as crooks and/or put out of business. I was able to find over 1000 (est.) message board registrations by one user name (“usandas2”) in the last 5 days. Each thread that I could access was the same post, and only one post was made in each board.
You understand the concept. What I don’t understand is why this works well enough for people to actually try: Why would Google’s Page Rank software care if a million zero-reputation sites link to your zero-reputation site? Page Rank, as I understand it, assigns weight to links based on the current rank of the page the link exists on. This is an incentive for the scammers to spam blogs and message boards, but it should make googlebombing counter-productive: They have to pay to set up a lot of sites that do them no good at all.
Yet they apparently do help them somehow. Maybe Google is trying to be ‘fair’ with their rankings and giving weight to links from sites with no reputation at all. Whatever it is, the algorithm needs to be changed.
Well, for a start they can go on a spamming fest to get lots of reasonably-ranking links from boards and blogs to their fake sites, giving those rank to pass on amongst themselves.
Secondly, pagerank isn’t the be-all and end-all, not by a long shot. http://www.pagerank-prediction.com/understanding_of_google_pagerank.html
I think the theory is that if many, different, independent sites each feel that yours is valuable enough to link to, 50 million people can’t be wrong. I also think that google uses other criteria than just this, but it’s a major factor. If it’s the links that make the reputation, it’s kind of a circular argument.
WAG: Maybe google is obsessed with current data, so they don’t want to take the time to see if a site hangs around long enough to be useful; they want to get the data out to the public a little too quickly.
