The words flowed like honey across my eyes. “I have to state, you chose your words well. The ideas you wrote on your encounters are well placed. This is an incredible blog!” And “I usually don’t post in Blogs but your blog forced me to, amazing work.. beautiful …” Now these are the kind of comments I’ve been waiting for. All those long hours glued to a keyboard trying desperately to think of something entertaining to say that doesn’t involve barnyard animals. It seemed that I finally hit pay dirt. I finally wrote something that resonated with the public in a way that I could only dream about. Day after day the comments have been pouring in. All were about the same post – Practice, Practice, Practice – that I wrote about two months ago, and all had absolutely nothing to do with my post. In fact all were totally and utterly bogus.
The reality of the situation is that I was the target of a “comment spam attack”.
I didn’t know there was such a thing.
Spam (with apologies to Hormel for starting a sentence with “spam” being forced to capitalize it and thereby infringing on their copyright canned luncheon “meat”) as you are all aware is the digital equivalent of junk mail. You open up your mailbox – whether online or on the porch – and all this stuff that 1) you don’t need and 2) you don’t want and 3) you didn’t ask for spills out. But you got it anyway. The rationale behind spam or junk mail is the same: to make money. However, the little piece of information that’s not out there, nor is ever even mentioned, is that spam and junk mail exist not to make money from you but to make money for the spammers/junk mailers from companies who actually think that this stuff works.
It works something like this. Sometime in the past you bought something at a store and the store got all your personal information from your credit card. You ended up in a database along with everybody else who ever bought anything with a credit card. Your personal details sit warmly ensconced within a computer’s storage located in some Strange Foreign Land where it’s cheaper to do this kind of stuff. The StrangeForeignLand Company, Ltd. buys the U.S. Postal Service’s address database which the USPS gladly sells because god knows they can’t make any money delivering the mail. They match up your real name and buying history from your credit card with your real address from the USPS data. They sell this combination back to the original company – and anybody else that wants it – who send you their new catalog showing highly retouched photographs of people who look exactly like you want to look wearing the clothes, sitting on the furniture, or using the tools which the company that sent you the catalog wants you to buy. You browse through it. Wow, that is such a cute camisole / lounge-chair / cordless pressure-washer! You think. I’ll order it right now.
Which is all well and good but do you rip out the convenient order form included with the catalog with all the easy-to-use sizing information? Nope. Do you call the friendly, helpful Customer Service Representative sweating in a shared 4’x4’ cubicle on the outskirts of Mumbai? No, I can hardly understand a word they say.No, what you do is go online and see the much larger photograph of the item displayed on their website with the clever little interactive buttons you can push to see the item in different colors and make it rotate through 360 degrees. Yeah, how cool is that? That is, in fact, what I do myself. You have fallen ever deeper in love with your item of choice and your spirits soar with the promise of “Free 3 Day Shipping” and a “no-quibble return policy”. You click Add to Cart.
So-far, so-good. But during the checkout process you have to answer three little questions that basically seal your fate and allow the catalog company to really make some money. The first is: What is the email address you want to have your receipt and shipping notice sent to? You dutifully answer. The second and third are variations of one question and go something like: Do you want us not to not send promotional material notices of special sales and savings and information on how you can look just like the people in our catalog that we usually wouldn’t not send for at least a fortnight? Which as you can clearly see means it doesn’t matter whether or not you check the little box. The third question is like the second adding the words “marketing partners”.
Now the catalog company has your name, address and email which they sell to their “marketing partners” who may or may not not send you their stuff depending on whether or not you did or did not not check the little box but who will sell your information to people who aren’t “marketing partners” of the original company and therefore aren’t covered by your problematic request not to receive information. The result is that basically every company on the planet owns your name, address, and email. Your Outlook Inbox fills up with junk email, your snail-mail box fills up with reams of unwanted catalogs, the Forests of the North are slashed to meet demand for paper pulp, and the Earth slowly stews in a blanket of carbonaceous smog.
Talk about unintended consequences.
This is all fine from an ethical point-of-view because you basically gave all this information away as you made your purchases. The insidious part comes next. The Customer Service Rep dripping away on the outskirts of Mumbai is tired of dealing with impatient Americans who are always complaining that they can’t understand a word she says. Her brother who knows a little about computers gives her a hard drive that is infected with a virus that is designed to strip the email addresses out of the company’s database. She plugs the drive into the USB port on her workstation and, as the French say, voila! Your email address is theirs and they sell it off to the highest bidder.
Now your email inbox starts filling up with all sorts of crap about Cheap Solar Energy or The Secret Vegetable That Gives You Flat Abs or Lose Ten Pounds In Ten Days or Gain Four Inches In Four Weeks. Among others. Here’s the catch. None of the web links in those emails has anything to do with what the email promises – I’ve checked. For those emails it’s all about getting you to click through and drive up the number of visits to the website which increases the website’s position in the all-important Search Engine Rankings (like Google) which allows the evil website to receive more advertising revenue for the ad space they display even though nobody who clicks through actually spends more than a second on the website before clicking the “Back” button. Capitalism in the 21st Century.
Which is still kind of OK if you look at capitalism as just a more efficient way to separate ignorant people from their money. But it takes just one little step to go from being an “email spammer” to being a “blog comment spammer”. Here’s the step. Take an email spammer, tie him or her to a chair and hit them upside the head with the biggest bag of stupid you can get your hands on. Well, that seems a bit extreme. Yeah, but first factor in that “blog comment spamming” is a manual process. The bag-smacked spammer has to sit there and do it all by hand. The process goes 1) enter your name, 2) enter your email address, 3) enter your website, and 4) enter your comment. This part of the process can be automated or semi-automated so would go kind of quickly even if the spammer were reduced to cut and paste for data input. The final step though can’t be automated. To actually send the comment the bonehead spammer has to read the security code written with the wavy script or the cross-hatched numbers and type it in one character at a time. Then click enter. That may be slow but why does that make them stupid? Because for this great manual input service, which is done only to lift the position where a website shows up in Google searches, which in fact doesn’t work at all, and which can be easily screened by software, they charge $59.
To do it ten thousand times.
Even if the spammers were oh-so efficient and could knock out one of these every ten seconds all day long it would still take them 27 hours to do all ten thousand. That works out to about two dollars and change per hour for their effort.
Gee, that is stupid. Yup.
I could picture the lonely spammer tied to his or her chair. Red, rheumy eyes peer from beneath drooping lids. The blue glow from the flickering monitor does nothing to enhance the death-mask pallor of pock-marked skin. I imagine the faint smell of acrid coffee as bony fingers probe the keyboard pounding in one security code after another. My heart goes out to them and I wonder what, exactly, I could do to help. A wave of kindness washed over me and I saw the way to lead them out of their own personal purgatories. In a burst of altruistic bonhomie, I took pity on my poor, hard-working, tragically underpaid compadres. I gathered all their internet addresses together and formatted a helpful and uplifting message to help ease their burden and give them hope for the future. My message of goodwill was “GET A LIFE YOU SUN-STARVED LOSER. www.jamesewing.com”. I sent 200,000 copies to each address.
For some unknown reason, my website suddenly moved onto the first page of Google search results. But my message must have worked because, just as abruptly, all the spam stopped. I love it when a plan comes together.