Dear Scammers - Do you really think we don't see what you're up to?

You know, I haven’t done one of those off-the-cuff blog posts in a while, you know, ones where I just write what I think without delusions of grandeur or pseudo-profound insights. So I figured why not make this post one of them? That’s why I originally started blogging all those many years ago anyway. If there’s one thing that I’ve noticed over the ten years that I’ve run both this blog and my German blog, it’s the inexorable rise of comment scammers. 

I first noticed them a few years ago, after my trip to Dubai back in 2016, which is hardly surprising given that my Dubai trip report is still one of the most successful article series on my blog five years later. I’ll be the first to admit that I originally kept a few of the less obnoxious examples of these things around on my blog in order to drive up interaction and hopefully also make my blog more attractive to the Google algorithm. I’ve since taken a more hard-line approach to them, deleting them whenever I see them pop up in my comments section. They’re not too much of a hassle for me anyway, given my low readership numbers, and even mass deletions are pretty easy in the blogger.com backend.

Now granted, 95.7% of these scam posts, such as the ones shown in the screenshots above, are probably created by simple bots and as such will require little to no human input, still I wonder what the scammers operating them are trying to accomplish? I mean come on, those scam posts are so formulaic and nonsensical, they might as well be a UN General Assembly resolution, or a statement from Donald Trump for that matter. It is almost always [INSENSECERE COMPLIMENT] + [QUESTIONABLE PROMISE] followed by [LINK TO QUESTIONABLE WEBSITE]. All of this is written in some piss-poor English that may seem professional in some third-rate language school in some provincial town in the Indus valley or central India but quite frankly doesn’t cut it. I mean seriously, even Stevie Wonder can see what you’re trying to do there, so why the hell do you even bother?

Also, why the hell are they using my blog of all places? News flash, it’s 2022, we have Facebook and Twitter, the two premier market places for scammers and rip-off artists. I mean come on, look at the comment section of every single post made by a major news outlet, or even the Irish Times, and you’ll see a seemingly endless parade of clearly bot-generated scam posts promoting anything from bitcoin scammers to forex scammers to, of all things, witch doctors! I swear I’m not making that last one up. It just goes to show how little effort whoever is operating these scambot networks are putting into their operations. I mean seriously? Witch Doctors? On a Facebook page aimed at Ireland? Are you for real? Granted, the Irish Health System is in perpetual crisis but we’re not THAT desperate yet! And then, there are the Fiverr scammers over on Twitter, trying to advertise their one man “graphics design” businesses under every tweet by the likes of CNN, BBC Al Jazeera as well as any other news or tech site that can’t run away fast enough, regardless of whether the tweet in questions talks about a new MacBook or a mass shooting in the US. Yep, seems extremely reliable!

Okay, to be fair, I’m probably not the target demographic for this digital pond scum anyway. Like so many of these easily distinguishable scams, they’re not aimed at the western digital market, which for the most part has become aware of these scammers and knows to ignore them, especially since reporting them to whatever social media network does nothing to remedy situation. They’re aimed much more at emerging markets, especially in sub-Saharan Africa or Asia, where significant parts of the population are only now beginning to get reliable internet access at prices that large parts of the population an afford. Once you take this into account, as well as the continuing presence of ancestral beliefs still present in significant parts of these regions, despite strenuous efforts by Christian and Evangelical missionaries, this sudden focus on “spellcasters” and “witch doctors” suddenly makes a whole lot more sense. The fact that these spammers literally spam their crap all over social media rather than targeting outlets in their own region just shows that they don’t give a fuck about what they’re doing. 

I guess it was to be expected that these chancers and con-artists would turn up eventually, given that this type always rears its good-for-nothing head whenever there’s a prospect for easy money. And let’s be honest, there are few places where it’s easier to swindle people out of their hard-earned cash than on the internet. Still, it’s disheartening that most of the people willing to engage in any type of interaction online these days exist solely to rip off other people. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to prepare some paperwork for a Nigerian prince.

Please Note: The letters used in this blog post were 100% responsibly sourced from recycled spam emails. After all, we all have to do our bit for the environment.