How to Spot a Psychopath

I have, of late, discovered that titling a blog post "You have money you didn't know about! Give us some of it!", and/or mentioning unclaimed money recovery services in that post, will attract a constant flow of spam-comments.

Spam-comments are aimed at the other 828 posts on this blog (829, counting this one) from time to time, but the unclaimed-money post gets way more than all of the others put together.

(It'll be interesting to see if the spammers now start aiming at this post as well, since I've used some of the same magical scam-attracting words.)

Akismet catches very nearly all of the spam-comments, so they never make it to the actual visible page and all I have to do is occasionally click the "empty" button for the spam-bin in my WordPress control panel. But still they come. Some are for the dodgy financial services you'd expect, but there are also many for other things, like the inevitable pharmacies, knockoff couture and wristwatches and, for some reason, at least one spammer monomaniacally obsessed with coupons for replacement heads for Swiffer floor cleaners.

This comment's an absolute star, though:

PAYPAL DONATE ME NOW OR I WILL HACK YOUR WEBSITE Says:
10 April 2012 at 12:23 am

PAYPAL PAYPAL DONATE ME NOW OR I WILL HACK YOUR WEBSITE- DON'T YOU DARE TO REPORT PAYPAL...

PAYPAL PAYPAL DONATE ME MOTHER PHUCKER NOW OR I WILL HACK YOUR WEBSITE - Scraped Media Pty Ltd MY PAYPAL IS PAYPAL@5t8.com - Scraped Media Pty Ltd - PAYPAL IS support@scrapebox.com Payment Sent to: MY PAYPAL IS support@scrapebox.com...

Akismet caught this one too, but it's so funny that I approved it anyway.

(Actually it's a trackback, not a comment. It purports to be a trackback from a post on donatenoworyourssitegone.com, but that site does not actually exist; the extremely desirable domain name isn't even registered. The trackback was, instead, probably sent from purpose-built comment-spamming software.)

This distinctive wording can be found on a few other pages. In this thread, someone who probably actually does represent Scraped Media says that this is some guy trying to frame them. It's a joe job, in other words; making someone else look bad by spamming ads for your competitors' products, or pretending to be your enemy and making threats, or blowing up your own shop, et cetera.

I wonder if this could actually work, though, and get Scrapebox's PayPal account frozen. A result like that wouldn't really stand out among the world's many dismal tales of PayPal dysfunction.

(To be fair, I did get my money back that one time, but it was because the seller didn't contest my claim.)

Since Scraped Media appear to be, via their ScrapeBox software, in the comment-spam business themselves, in this particular conflict I think it's a damn shame somebody has to win. (And yes, ScrapeBox can fire off fake trackbacks just like this one.)

I'll check back on this in a few weeks, and see who actually ends up doing what to whom.